Perhaps it was all very beneficial to him. No doubt it was too much his way to _affect_ a good-humoured tolerance of destiny; to repudiate responsibility, in speech or act, on the strength of a certain genial creed of fatality that assumed itself independent of the laws of obligation. To have that much of the vagabond in one, that one moves serenely indifferent to conventional restrictions, is excellent; but to insist upon one’s vagabondage is to be a didactic vagabond; and that is intolerable. For it is to assume that orthodox folk must accept vagabondage as the superior condition, which, being orthodox, they cannot. Therefore it was that, upon the morning following his visit to the theatre, our gentleman started--as he had obstinately resolved he would do--upon his homeward journey, quite truculent with a sense of grievance. There was little in the prospect about him that served to otherwise than confirm his depression. Winter, it was evident, was asserting itself with a despotic and merciless rigour that was deaf to all considerations of humanity. The sleet of the previous night had frozen into and made long icy crevasses of the road-ruts; the throat of the wind was hoarse with cold; the grey of utter lifelessness stretched from earth to sky--a grey that no fury of the stiff blast could rend or discompose. Each hour linked itself to the next with a bolt of iron as, his teeth set to the driving chill, he urged his long way forward. The road clanked under him; the scarlet nostrils of his straining horse palpitated like blown coals against a background of ashes. He did not much care to think of anything but his own miserable discomfort; and in that he took some hard satisfaction, as if by enduring it he were shaming the callous soul who had bidden him away from his cosy fireside in the “Adelphi.” It was at this climax of his meditations that humour and hunger ventured upon a little roguish assault on his epigastrium. Had the attack failed, he had been other than the man of this history. It did not, by any means. He sighed, drew himself up, twinkled over the collapse of his pondered heroics, broke into a laugh, half-vexed, half-jocund, and fairly plunged into that illuminating thought of the æsthetic value of appetite to a free man. “For I am free!” he cried to the winds--“and responsible in all the world to nobody but myself!”