They departed at last, and Mr. Horne, for once in an ill humour,
followed me into the bedroom. Here I must be excused if I draw a
veil over his manly sorrow at discovering what fate had done for
him. Remember what was his position, unclothed in the Castle of
Antwerp! The nearest suitable change for those which had been
destroyed was locked up in his portmanteau at the Hotel de Belle Rue
in Brussels! He had nothing left to him--literally nothing, in that
Antwerp world. There was no other wretched being wandering then in
that Dutch town so utterly denuded of the goods of life. For what
is a man fit,--for what can he be fit,--when left in such a
position? There are some evils which seem utterly to crush a man;
and if there be any misfortune to which a man may be allowed to
succumb without imputation on his manliness, surely it is such as
this. How was Mr. Horne to return to his hotel without incurring
the displeasure of the municipality? That was my first thought.

He had a cloak, but it was at the inn; and I found that my friend
was oppressed with a great horror at the idea of being left alone;
so that I could not go in search of it. There is an old saying,
that no man is a hero to his valet de chambre, the reason doubtless
being this, that it is customary for his valet to see the hero
divested of those trappings in which so much of the heroic consists.
Who reverences a clergyman without his gown, or a warrior without
his sword and sabre-tasche? What would even Minerva be without her
helmet?

I do not wish it to be understood that I no longer reverenced Mr.
Horne because he was in an undress; but he himself certainly lost
much of his composed, well-sustained dignity of demeanour. He was
fearful and querulous, cold, and rather cross. When, forgetting his