I felt what it was to be wolfish and even ravening; and I noted, step by step, in myself, how a strange sagacity grew within me--an art of detecting food.

It was during the American war, and there were thousands of us pitifully starved.

When we came near some log hut I began at once to surmise, if I saw a flour sack lying about, that there was a mill not far distant; perhaps flour or bread in the house; while the dwellers in the hut were closely scanned to judge from their appearance if they were well fed, and of a charitable disposition.

It is a melancholy thing to recall; but it is absolutely necessary for a thinker to have once lived such a life, that he may be able to understand what is the intellectual status of those fellow beings whose whole life is simply a hunt for enough food to sustain life, and enough beer to cheer it.
I have spoken of the Gipsy fondness for the hedgehog.

Richard Liebich, in his book, _Die Zigeuner in ihrem Wesen und in ihrer Sprache_, tells his readers that the only indication of a belief in a future state which he ever detected in an old Gipsy woman, was that she once dreamed she was in heaven.