Excerpt from The Little Gray Shoe: A Romance You should certainly return at once, the letter concluded, and by way of disagreement I muttered an oath. So far I had ordered my own afl'airs, taking advice of none, and if I had found strange places and come into queer company, what was that to anyone? I had asked no favours and owed no man anything. It is a fool's game to let others guide your life for you; with the best intentions they are sure, sooner or later, to bring you into the shallows, may perchance 'make wreckage of you altogether. I drank the remains of the liquor in a tankard which stood on the rough table beside me, and stared out of the open door across the barrack yard. In the covered way along the opposite wall a score or more of men were gaming and drinking, laughing or cursing as the cards or the dice fell in their favour or otherwise; while one burly fellow, whose liquor seemed to have gone to his head instead of his stomach, was straddling on a barrel set on end and roaring out a ribald ditty, first chanted, I should fancy, on a Paris boulevard. They were representative of a godless crew, these fellows, recruited from almost every capital in Europe, and their native land was probably the richer for having seen the last of them. So long as a man had the physique for the work, few questions were asked when he joined the King's Guard, and if he did that work satisfactorily, small notice was taken of any thing else he might do. It was a company of broken down gentlemen, spendthrifts, ne'er-do-wells, and crim inals who had fled from justice; a company feared by every respectable citizen, and without its counterpart, I warrant, though the search began at Lisbon and ended at Petersburg. Oh, I sat in no harsh judgment on these fellows; how could I? I was of the King's Guard myself. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.