“Who is the greater man, and who the greater barbarian—that lord, who, seeing the minstrel’s well-worn clothes, angrily left the table, who gave him not the millionth part of his possessions in payment of his labor, and now lazily sitting in his brilliant, comfortable room, calmly opines about the events that are happening in China, and justifies the massacres that have been done there; or the little minstrel, who, risking imprisonment, with a franc in his pocket, and doing no harm to anyone, has been going about for a score of years, up hill and down dale, rejoicing men’s hearts with his songs, though they have jeered at him, and almost cast him out of the pale of humanity; and who, in weariness and cold and shame, has gone off to sleep, no one knows where, on his filthy straw?”
At this moment, from the city, through the dead silence of the night, far, far away, I caught the sound of the little man’s guitar and his voice.
“No,” something involuntarily said to me, “you have no right to commiserate the little man, or to blame the lord for his well-being. Who can weigh the inner happiness which is