An Old Acquaintance

Thus excluded from everybody's confidence, and attaining no further, by
my most earnest study, than to an uncertain sense of something hidden
from me, it would appear reasonable that I should have flung off all
these alien perplexities. Obviously, my best course was to betake
myself to new scenes. Here I was only an intruder. Elsewhere there
might be circumstances in which I could establish a personal interest,
and people who would respond, with a portion of their sympathies, for
so much as I should bestow of mine.

Nevertheless, there occurred to me one other thing to be done.
Remembering old Moodie, and his relationship with Priscilla, I
determined to seek an interview, for the purpose of ascertaining
whether the knot of affairs was as inextricable on that side as I found
it on all others. Being tolerably well acquainted with the old man's
haunts, I went, the next day, to the saloon of a certain establishment
about which he often lurked. It was a reputable place enough,
affording good entertainment in the way of meat, drink, and fumigation;
and there, in my young and idle days and nights, when I was neither
nice nor wise, I had often amused myself with watching the staid humors
and sober jollities of the thirsty souls around me.

At my first entrance, old Moodie was not there. The more patiently to
await him, I lighted a cigar, and establishing myself in a corner, took
a quiet, and, by sympathy, a boozy kind of pleasure in the customary
life that was going forward. The saloon was fitted up with a good deal
of taste. There were pictures on the walls, and among them an
oil-painting of a beefsteak, with such an admirable show of juicy
tenderness, that the beholder sighed to think it merely visionary, and
incapable of ever being put upon a gridiron. Another work of high art
was the lifelike representation of a noble sirloin; another, the
hindquarters of a deer, retaining the hoofs and tawny fur; another, the
head and shoulders of a salmon; and, still more exquisitely finished, a
brace of canvasback ducks, in which the mottled feathers were depicted
with the accuracy of a daguerreotype. Some very hungry painter, I
suppose, had wrought these subjects of still-life, heightening his
imagination with his appetite, and earning, it is to be hoped, the
privilege of a daily dinner off whichever of his pictorial viands he
liked best.