But he had been spoilt, and there was no pleasing him. He changed his
room every month. There was nothing wrong with the rooms, but they
were not like his old room. It had become such a habit with him to
walk through certain streets, that he often found himself before his
old front door before he realised his mistake. He was like a lost
child.
Eventually he went to live in a boarding house, a solution which he
had always loathed and dreaded. And then his friends lost sight of him
altogether.
One evening, as the Pole was sitting alone over his grog, smoking,
drinking, and nodding with the capacity of the oriental to lapse into
complete stupor, the bookseller burst in on him like a thunderstorm,
flung his hat on the table, and shouted:
"Confound him! Has anybody ever heard anything like it?"
The Pole roused himself from his brandy-and-tobacco Nirvana, and
rolled his eyes.
"I say, confound it! Has anybody ever heard anything like it? He's
going to be married!"
"Who's going to be married?" asked the Pole, startled by the
bookseller's violence and emphatic language.
"Schoolmaster Blom!"
The bookseller expected a glass of grog in exchange for his news. The
proprietor left the counter and came to their table to listen.
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