said he hated to go home. We had to drag him out with a rope. But here we are at your hotel.”
We entered.
But how changed the place seemed.
Our feet echoed on the flagstones of the deserted rotunda.
At the office desk sat a clerk, silent and melancholy, reading the Bible. He put a marker in the book and closed it, murmuring “Leviticus Two.”
Then he turned to us.
“Can I have a room,” I asked, “on the first floor?”
A tear welled up into the clerk’s eye.
“You can have the whole first floor,” he said, and he added, with a half sob, “and the second, too, if you like.”
I could not help contrasting his manner with what it was in the old days, when the mere mention of a room used to throw him into a fit of passion, and when he used to tell me that I could have a cot on the roof till Tuesday, and after that, perhaps, a bed in the stable.
Things had changed indeed.
“Can I get breakfast in the grill room?” I inquired of the melancholy clerk.
He shook his head sadly.
“There is no grill room,” he answered. “What would you like?”
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