villainous as any under the immediate command of Grandmother
"Baboushka;" and their dress was not much better. More than one dandy of
the gutter nursed the head of a club called significantly the
"lawbreaker's canes of crime," with a distant air of the fop sucking his
clouded amber knob or silver shepherd's-crook. In more than one group
were horse-copers, and their kin the market-gardeners' thieves and
country wagoners' pests, who not only lighten the loads on the way to
the city market on the road, but plunder the drivers after they receive
their salesmoney by cheating at cards.

The student, crowded in by this mixed throng, began to doubt the
providential quality of the intervention saving him from an explanation
to the police; it was very like leaping from the proverbial frying-pan
into the fire.

At this stage in his reflections, he felt that a person in the next seat
had risen and he soon perceived that he had politely, or from a stronger
reason, given up his place to another. This was the old Jew, but he
would not have known him by his dress, it was so changed for the better;
the fine profile, the venerable beard which an Arab Sheikh would have
reverenced, and the sharp, intelligent eyes were unaltered.

"Do you speak Latin?" inquired Daniels in that tongue.

But Claudius, though reading the dead tongue fluently, pronounced it
after the University manner, and felt that he could not sustain a
dialogue with one who followed the Italian usage. He could speak
Italian, however, for he had long studied it to be at home in the world
of Art.