"Is it so?" asked the old soldier, as his hand hoveringly passed above the coins. "Upon my honour it is, sir!" said the Mayor, with serious emphasis. The audience thought it the best speech he had ever made in his life, and cheered him till the roof rang again. "Oh! bread, bread, for you, darling!" cried the veteran, bowing his head over the child, and taking out his cross and kissing it with passion; "and the badge of honour still for me!" While the audience was in the full depth of its emotion, and generous tears in many an eye, Waife seized his moment, dropped the actor, and stepped forth to the front as the man--simple, quiet, earnest man--artless man! "This is no mimic scene, ladies and gentlemen. It is a tale in real life that stands out before you. I am here to appeal to those hearts that are not vainly open to human sorrows. I plead for what I have represented. True, that the man who needs your aid is not one of that soldiery which devastated Europe. But he has fought in battles as severe, and been left by fortune to as stern a desolation. True, he is not a Frenchman; he is one of a land you will not love less than France,--it is your own. He, too, has a child whom he would save from famine. He, too, has nothing left to sell or to pawn for bread,--except--oh, not this gilded badge, see, this is only foil and cardboard,--except, I say, the thing itself, of which you respect even so poor a symbol,--nothing left to sell or to pawn but Honour! For these I have pleaded this night as a showman; for these, less haughty than the Frenchman, I stretch my hands towards you without shame; for these I am a beggar." He was silent. The dog quietly took up the hat and approached the Mayor again. The Mayor extracted the half-crown he had previously deposited, and dropped into the hat two golden sovereigns. Who does not guess the rest? All crowded forward,--youth and age, man and woman. And most ardent of all were those whose life stands most close to vicissitude, most exposed to beggary, most sorely tried in the alternative between bread and honour. Not an operative there but spared his mite. CHAPTER XIII. Omne ignotum pro magnifico.--Rumour, knowing nothing of his antecedents, exalts Gentleman Waife into Don Magnifico.