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Hark! a rap at my door. Welcome anybody just now. One gains nothing by attempting to shut out the sprites of the weather. They come in at the keyhole; they peer through the dripping panes; they insinuate themselves through the crevices of the casement, or plump down chimney astride of the raindrops.

I rise and throw open the door. A tall, shambling, loose- jointed figure; a pinched, shrewd face, sun-brown and wind- dried; small, quick-winking black eyes,–there he stands, the water dripping from his pulpy hat and ragged elbows.

I speak to him; but he returns no answer. With a dumb show of misery, quite touching, he hands me a soiled piece of parchment, whereon I read what purports to be a melancholy account of shipwreck and disaster, to the particular detriment, loss, and damnification of one Pietro Frugoni, who is, in consequence, sorely in want of the alms of all charitable Christian persons, and who is, in short, the bearer of this veracious document, duly certified and indorsed by an Italian consul in one of our Atlantic cities, of a high-sounding, but to Yankee organs unpronounceable, name.

Here commences a struggle. Every man, the Mahometans tell us, has two attendant angels,–the good one on his right shoulder, the bad on his left. “Give,” says Benevolence, as with some difficulty I fish up a small coin from the depths of my pocket. “Not a cent,” says selfish Prudence; and I drop it from my fingers. “Think,” says the good angel, “of the poor stranger in a strange land, just escaped from the terrors of the sea-storm, in which his little property has perished, thrown half-naked and helpless on our shores, ignorant of our language, and unable to find employment suited to his capacity.” “A vile impostor!” replies the left-hand sentinel; “his paper purchased from one of those ready-writers in New York who manufacture beggar-credentials at the low price of one dollar per copy, with earthquakes, fires, or shipwrecks, to suit customers.”

Amidst this confusion of tongues I take another survey of my visitant. Ha! a light dawns upon me. That shrewd, old face, with its sharp, winking eyes, is no stranger to me. Pietro Frugoni, I have seen thee before. *Si, signor,* that face of thine has looked at me over a dirty white neckcloth, with the corners of that cunning mouth drawn downwards, and those small eyes turned up in sanctimonious gravity, while thou wast offering to a crowd of half-grown boys an extemporaneous exhortation in the capacity of a travelling preacher. Have I not seen it peering out from under a blanket, as that of a poor Penobscot Indian, who had lost the use of his hands while trapping on the Madawaska? Is it not the face of the forlorn father of six small children, whom the “marcury doctors” had “pisened” and crippled? Did it not belong to that down-east unfortunate who had been out to the “Genesee country”(1) and got the “fevernnager,” and whose hand shook so pitifully when held out to receive my poor gift? The same, under all disguises,–Stephen Leathers, of Barrington,–him, and none other! Let me conjure him into his own likeness:–

(1) The *Genesee country* is the name by which the western part of New York, bordering on Lakes Ontario and Erie, was known, when, at the close of the last and beginning of this century, it was to people on the Atlantic coast the Great West. In 1792 communication was opened by a road with the Pennsylvania settlements, but the early settlers were almost all from New England.

“Well, Stephen, what news from old Barrington?”

“Oh, well, I thought I knew ye,” he answers, not the least disconcerted. “How do you do? and how’s your folks? All well, I hope. I took this ‘ere paper, you see, to help a poor furriner, who could n’t make himself understood any more than a wild goose. I though I’d just start him for’ard a little. It seemed a marcy to do it.”