146 "A MAN FOR BREAKFAST."
down his head very soon, and to shun people in stinctively since they seemed to wish to shun him.
I am bound to confess, right here, that after this murder, when the whole camp seemed turned against this shy, shrinking, silent man, when he was despised by all, when no one would share the path with him, but would make him stand aside and leave the trail as if he had been an Indian or a Chinaman, I began to sympathize with him. When the world pointed its finger and set the mark of Cain upon the man, I began to like him.
This, you say, seems to you remarkable. It is certainly remarkable, or I should not trouble myself to mention it.
There was now an expression in this man s face that I had not seen before. A sort of weary, tired look it was, that was pitiful. An idea took possession of me that he had grown tired in his journey from place to place in the world, looking for the place where he belonged, for a sort of niche where he would fit in, and which he had never yet found.
There are men who sit in a community like a centre gem in a cluster of diamonds, and who cannot be taken away without deranging and marring the whole. The place of such a man is vacant till the last one of the cluster of which he forms the centre goes down in the dust.
There are others, again, who grow on the side or even in the centre of a community, like a great wart or wen. They sap its strength, they stop its growth,
