The Beloved Vagabond

MP3 Audio CD. The Beloved Vagabond

CHAPTER I


This is not a story about myself. Like Canning's organ-grinder I have
none to tell. It is the story of Paragot, the belovéd vagabond--please
pronounce his name French-fashion--and if I obtrude myself on your
notice it is because I was so much involved in the medley of farce and
tragedy which made up some years of his life, that I don't know how to
tell the story otherwise. To Paragot I owe everything. He is at once my
benefactor, my venerated master, my beloved friend, my creator. Clay in
his hands, he moulded me according to his caprice, and inspired me with
the breath of life. My existence is drenched with the colour of Paragot.
I lay claim to no personality of my own, and any obiter dicta that may
fall from my pen in the course of the ensuing narrative are but
reflections of Paragot's philosophy. Men have spoken evil of him. He
snapped his fingers at calumny, but I winced, never having reached the
calm altitudes of scorn wherein his soul has its habitation. I burned to
defend him, and I burn now; and that is why I propose to write his
apologia, his justification.

Why he singled me out for adoption from among the unwashed urchins of
London I never could conjecture. Once I asked him.

"Because," said he, "you were ugly, dirty, ricketty, under-sized,
underfed and wholly uninteresting. Also because your mother was the very
worst washer-woman that ever breathed gin into a shirt-front."

I did not resent these charges, direct and implied, against my mother.
She did launder villainously, and she did drink gin, and of the nine
uncared-for gutter-snipes she brought into the world, I think I was the
most unkempt and neglected. I know that Sunday-school books tell you to
love your mother; but if the only maternal