sitions of a general nature which nobody present
seemed capable of grappling with; so the faint-
hearted man went on: "When she says she
won't do a thing, she won't."

"You've no perseverance," said the Royal
Duke. " Try her again."

"Try her yourself," retorted the faint-hearted
man.

"Come here, Jenny," said the Royal Duke,
in a fierce tone. The seal came across the bath
to where he stood, looked timidly up at him,
and slunk away to the other end of the tank.

Such was the exhibition at which your eye-
witness assisted with a heavy heart. Sometimes
the regal-looking personage, dragging the seal
about by the skin of its back, and, pushing it
violently across the bath, would force it almost
into the mouth of the faint-hearted man, who
was the chief exhibitor. On these occasions
she would, in desperation, raise her head and
breast out of the water and put her lips to his
mouth. Sometimes she would half present him
with a fin. But where was the talking? Was
this the animal for whose feats of dialogue the
public had been prepared by a placard stuck on
every dead wall in London, representing a
British sailor in earnest conversation, not to say
argument, with an enormous codfish standing
upright upon the tip of its tail? Was this all?
No, this was not all. To the eye of your witness
there was exhibited the heart of that poor
seal. He read it through her eyes; and, in it,
read a tale of sorrow that made his own heart
sad, and caused him for a moment reverently to
hope that even for the sufferings of the brute
creation there may be some compensating good
in store. He hoped this as far as might consist
with romance, and it comforted him; for the eyes
of that seal, their expression, and the capability
of feeling which they seemed to indicate, haunted
him as he left the place, and are before him now
while he writes.

There is, in the Exhibition of the Royal
Academy this year, a picture by Sir Edwin
Landseer, which has been received somewhat
unmercifully, and which yet—besides possessing
many pictorial beauties of a high grade—is, in
its dim suggestion of a hope that even the lower
animals are not wholly excluded from a share in
the scheme of Heaven's mercy, very beautiful.
It is the work of one who, as has been
said, suggests this rather than asserts it. The
minds of those who feel deeply will at times
stretch forward thus in a strong sympathy with
the sufferings of creation, and will strain to get
a glimpse beyond that glass through which we
see so darkly.

The Talking Fish declined to talk. And
yet to your eye-witness she did talk, and oh, how
plainly! How plainly, as she worked herself
round and round, and looked from face to face,
how plainly she spoke, not with, her mouth,
indeed, but with her wistful eyes.

"What have I done?" she said—"what have
I done, that this misery should have come upon
me? What is this close and stifling room!
What are these faces that gaze at me in my
prison? Why am I here? Where is the sea
that used to stretch around me further than my
eyes could follow? Where the mighty river at
whose mouth I lived? Where the sun, in which
I loved to bask? Where is my mate? They
have taken him from me, and killed him. Oh that
they would kill me too, and deliver me from this
dreadful place!

THE SECOND SITTING.

WE left (at page 189) Monsieur Werdet
successful, after some preliminary disappointment
and humiliation, in his first literary treaty with
Balzac. We left him, the happy proprietor and
hopeful publisher of the second edition of Le
Médecin de Campagne.

Once started, Monsieur Werdet was too wise
a man not to avail himself of the only certain
means of success in modern times. He puffed
magnificently. Every newspaper in Paris was
inundated with a deluge of advertisements,
announcing the forthcoming work in terms of
eulogy such as the wonderstruck reader had
never met with before. The result, aided by
Balzac's celebrity, was a phenomenon in the
commercial history of French literature, at that
time. Every copy of the second edition of Le
Médecin de Campagne was sold in eight days.

This success established Monsieur Werdet's
reputation. Young authors crowded to him with
their manuscripts, all declaring piteously that
they wrote in the style of Balzac. But Monsieur
Werdet flew at higher game. He received the
imitators politely, and even published for one or
two of them; but the high business aspirations
which now glowed within him were all concentrated
on the great original. He had conceived
the sublime idea of becoming Balzac's sole
publisher; of buying up all his copyrights held by
other houses, and of issuing all his new works
that were yet to be written. Balzac himself
welcomed this proposal with superb indulgence.
"Walter Scott," he said, in his grandest way,
"had only one publisher—Archibald Constable.
Work out your idea. I authorise it; I
support it. I will be Scott, and you shall be
Constable!"

Fired by the prodigious future thus disclosed
to him, Monsieur Werdet assumed forthwith the
character of a French Constable; and opened
negotiations with no less than six publishers
who held among them the much-desired copy-rights.
His own enthusiasm did something for
him; his excellent previous character in the
trade, and his remarkable success at starting,
did much more. The houses he dealt with took
his bills in all directions, without troubling him
for security. After innumerable interviews and
immense exercise of diplomacy, he raised himself
at last to the pinnacle of his ambition—he became
sole proprietor and publisher of the works
of Balzac.

The next question—a sordid, but, unhappily,
a necessary question also—was how to turn this
precious acquisition to the best pecuniary account.
Some of the works, such as La