📔 A Tramp Abroad

She came at night, and in a storm, with only two attendants, and stood before a peasant’s hut, tired, bedraggled, soaked with rain, “the red print of her lost crown still girdling her brow,” and implored admittance—and was refused!

A few days before, the adulations and applauses of a nation were sounding in her [Marie Louise, Duchess of Parma's] ears, and now she was come to this!

Toward morning, while the old man sat exhausted and asleep in his chair where he had been sitting before his books as one who watches by his beloved dead and prints the features on his memory for a solace in the aftertime of empty desolation, his daughter sprang into the room and gently woke him, saying-- "My presentiment was true!