for a score of guests, yet Luke feasted alone.
This was his compensation for the misery he
had endured during that period of his life when,
already accustomed to luxury, he had been
subjected to indignity and want. While everybody
else feasted he had starved. Tit for tat.
He now invited himself to a gorgeous banquet,
from which everybody else was excluded. Luke
was a very bad fellow, but there was something
in his nature that harmonised with my own. I
felt more glad than I ought to have been when
he was regaling himself in his selfish fashion;
less glad than I ought to have been when his
brother returned to life, and retributive justice
hurled him from his lofty eminence.

My feelings, when I brought home the puppet
and laid it on the parlour table before me, must
have been extremely similar to those of Luke
when he first sat down to his feast. I had had
my period of privation. I had not indeed
suffered poverty, but I had lost the capability of
being amused, which alone makes life tolerable.
The people standing round the show from
which Punch squeaked forth his paltry ribaldry
had roared with laughter, while I was altogether
unmoved. Now the tables were about
to be turned. Punch should squeak for me
alone; and that very fact might be sufficient
to season his wretched jokes even for my dull
palate.

One of my readers, looking extremely sagacious,
wonders that I could be such a fool as to
lay Punch on the table and expect him to get
up of his own accord; and is willing to explain
how the hand of the human performer, craftily
inserted into the puppet, is the sole cause of
its brief vitality. If, having purchased Punch,
I had managed him after the approved fashion,
moving his arms with two of my fingers and
his head with a third, there would at least have
been a method in my madness.

Exactly, I ought to have been amused by
witnessing the twiddle of my own fingers. In
that case a handkerchief knotted into that
infantile semblance of a confessional, wherewith
nurses vainly try to amuse squalling children,
would have answered my purpose. The verb
"amuse" rose before me in the purely passive
form. I did not want to amuse myself, but to
be amused—that is, by somebody or something
that was not myself, and the sight of Punch in
the street suggested to me that the puppet was
the destined source of amusement.

So far so good; but, as the sagacious reader
has perceived, I have not yet accounted for my
extreme folly in believing that Punch was
capable of spontaneous motion. The wish that
the inanimate figure might squeak and jump
about was ridiculous enough, but it was not
without precedent. The German poet Heine
once wished that every paving-stone might
have an oyster in its shell, and that the earth
might be visited by heavy showers of champagne;
and a town where the window-panes
are made of barley-sugar, and ready-roasted
pigs, with knives and forks stuck into their
bodies, run about squeaking, "Come, eat me"
—such a town has for years been the coveted
Utopia of many an infant epicure. But why,
in my case, did the floating desire condense
itself into a firm belief? Why did such a
trivial wish become father to such a very
audacious thought?

If the sagacious reader persists in this question
he has never known what it is to be really
in love. For if he has experienced the sort of
love, out of which such works as Romeo and
Juliet can be fashioned, he must be perfectly
aware that there is a state of mind in which
wish and belief are entirely commensurate with
each other. Tell a lover, fired with the sort
of passion, which I now have in view, that his
idol is quick-tempered, greedy, vain, selfish—
give her, in short, any attribute that militates
against perfection, and support your assertions
with any amount of evidence, and you will find
that the false faultless image, which is set up
in his own mind, is not to be overthrown by
living witness or by lively argument. No; he
worships a mental ideal, and the earthly figure
which he has chosen as its corresponding
actuality must exactly resemble it, in spite of
every obstacle. When the idol, so strenuously
bolstered up, falls down, it comes with a crash,
as in the case of Othello.

Well, the desire of seeing a spontaneously
jumping Punch, had with me reached the
intensity of belief, and as the figure lay on the
table before me, I honestly expected it to get
up and execute some of its wonted feats. It
was exactly eight o'clock when I commenced
my experiment, and when the timepiece had
struck the half-hour I was still, with fixed eyes,
staring at a motionless Punch. When I heard
the indication that an hour was completed, I
was in despair.

For about ten minutes, as I learned by the
timepiece, my mind was a perfect blank; but I
was roused by a sharp ring at the bell.
impelled by I know not what instinct, I strode to
the street door, and tearing it open, saw an
uncouth person with unkempt hair, holding in
his hand a vessel, apparently of tarnished
silver, which he proffered for a moment and
then withdrew. Following the motion of his
arm, I snatched it from him, and closing the
door with a bang, rushed back into the dining-
room, an inner voice telling me that I now held
an elixir of life which would animate the
puppet. I sprinkled a few drops on the rigid
face, and inclined my own head towards it with
feverish expectation. A smart stroke on be
left ear, causing me considerable pain, startled
me from my contemplation. I raised myself to
an erect posture, and to my infinite delight,
saw Punch sitting upright, and brandishing his
cudgel with more than wonted vigour. (By
the way, I should have said before that I put
this weapon in its proper place, with the arms
of the figure folded across it, when I first laid
my purchase on the table.)

Punch not only moved, and rattled his tiny
legs, but his eyes seemed to flash with a vivid
intelligence which I had never perceived in the
show, and he appeared to meditate some decisive
action. He did not meditate long, but aimed a