‘Who are you?’ I said, turning round horror-stricken; for close beside me was a miserable man, apparently in the last stage of disease. He was pale as death, yet eaten up with sores. His body was agitated by a nervous trembling. He seemed to shuffle along on hands and feet, as though the ordinary mode of locomotion was impossible to him, and yet was in possession of all his limbs. Pain was written in his face. I drew away to leave him room, with mingled pity and horror that this poor wretch should be the partner of the only shelter I could find within so short a time of my arrival. I who---- It was horrible, shameful, humiliating; and yet the suffering in his wretched face was so evident that I could not but feel a pang of pity too. ‘I have nowhere to go,’ I said. ‘I am--a stranger. I have been badly used, and nobody seems to care.’ ‘No,’ he said; ‘nobody cares--don’t you look for that. Why should they? Why, you look as if you were sorry for _me_! What a joke!’ he murmured to himself--‘what a joke! Sorry for some one else! What a fool the fellow must be!’ ‘You look,’ I said, ‘as if you were suffering horribly; and you say you have come here for years.’ ‘Suffering! I should think I was,’ said the sick man; ‘but what is that to you? Yes; I’ve been here for years--oh, years!--that means nothing,--for longer than can be counted. Suffering is not the word--it’s torture--it’s agony. But who cares? Take your leg out of my way.’ I drew myself out of his way from a sort of habit, though against my will, and asked, from habit too, ‘Are you never any better than now?’ He looked at me more closely, and an air of astonishment came over his face. ‘What d’ye want here,’ he said, ‘pitying a man! That’s something new here. No; I’m not always so bad, if you want to know. I get better, and then I go and do what makes me bad again, and that’s how it will go on; and I choose it to be so, and you needn’t bring any of your d----d pity here.’ ‘I may ask, at least, why aren’t you looked after? Why don’t you get into some hospital?’ I said. ‘Hospital!’ cried the sick man, and then he too burst out into that furious laugh, the most awful sound I ever had heard. Some of the passers-by stopped to hear what the joke was, and surrounded me with once more a circle of mockers. ‘Hospitals! perhaps you would like a whole Red Cross Society, with ambulances and all arranged?’ cried one. ‘Or the _Misericordia_!’ shouted another. I sprang up to my feet, crying, ‘Why not?’ with an impulse of rage which gave me strength. Was I never to meet with anything but this fiendish laughter? ‘There’s some authority, I suppose,’ I cried in my fury. ‘It is not the rabble that is the only master here, I hope.’ But nobody took the least trouble to hear what I had to say for myself. The last speaker struck me on the mouth, and called me an accursed fool for talking of what I did not understand; and finally they all swept on and passed away.