And when that source failed, he was driven
to adopt a harmless trick: he painted the
incident half at random, showing the rough
sketch to the subject of it, and profiting by
his reluctant corrections and criticisms. Mr.
Desanges himself almost deserves to be decorated
for his devotion and skill in producing
his truthful and most illustrative gallery, that
pictures so vividly the scenes which in each case
won the Victoria Cross.

In the street you meet decorated soldiers
with their medals at their breasts; you stop
them, ask them of their adventures, and
why they received such and such medals and
clasps; above all, why they received the cross
for valour? They shift about from one leg
to another, look terribly embarrassed, sometimes
black, mutter something wholly unintelligible,
and stalk away, more unwilling to speak
than so-many coy school-girls. Perhaps this very
modesty is a necessary accompaniment of courage;
and yet, look at the Frenchman: brave as a
lion, he is also as naïvely vain as a pretty woman.
Whether you like it or no, you must perforce
hear all the story of why he was décoré, and what
prodigies of valour he performed. Ma foi! yes,
monsieur, prodigies—ha! It is all owing to the
different genius of the different countries, and their
different habits and manners. Merit in France
goes about with a looking-glass in her hand and
the most piquant of little caps on her coquettish
head. Merit inEngland muffles herself up in a poke
bonnet and a dark-blue, ugly veil, and is more
than half offended if any one call out to a by-stander
to look and see what a fine face she has
underneath!

THE BACHELOR BEDROOM.

THE great merit of this subject is that it
starts itself. The Bachelor Bedroom is familiar
to everybody who owns a country house, and to
everybody who has stayed in a country house.
It is the one especial sleeping apartment, in all
civilised residences used for the reception of
company, which preserves a character of its own.
Married people and young ladies may be shifted
about from bedroom to bedroom as their own
caprice or the domestic convenience of the host
may suggest. But the bachelor guest, when he
has once had his room set apart for him, contrives
to dedicate it to the perpetual occupation
of single men from that moment. Who else is
to have the room afterwards, when the very
atmosphere of it is altered by tobacco-smoke?
Who can venture to throw it open to nervous
spinsters, or respectable married couples, when
the footman is certain, from mere force of habit,
to make his appearance at the door, with contraband
bottles and glasses, after the rest of the
family have retired for the night? Where, even if
these difficulties could be got over, is any second
sleeping apartment to be found, in any house of
ordinary construction, isolated enough to secure
the soberly reposing portion of the guests from
being disturbed by the regular midnight party
which the bachelor persists in giving in his bedroom?
Dining-rooms and breakfast-rooms may
change places; double-bedded rooms and single-bedded
rooms may shift their respective characters
backwards and forwards amicably among
each other—but the Bachelor Bedroom remains
immovably in its own place; sticks immutably
to its own bad character; stands out victoriously
whether the house is full, or whether the house
is empty, the one hospitable institution that no
repentant after-thoughts of host or hostess can
ever alter.

Such a social phenomenon as this, taken with
its surrounding circumstances, deserves more
notice than it has yet obtained. The bachelor
has been profusely served up on all sorts of
literary tables; but, the presentation of him has
been hitherto remarkable for a singularly monotonous
flavour of matrimonial sauce. We have
heard of his loneliness, and its remedy; of his
solitary position in illness, and its remedy; of
the miserable neglect of his linen, and its
remedy. But what have we heard of him in
connexion with his remarkable bedroom, at
those periods of his existence when he, like the
rest of the world, is a visitor at his friend's
country house? Who has presented him, in his
relation to married society, under those peculiar
circumstances of his life, when he is away from
his solitary chambers, and is thrown straight into
the sacred centre of that home circle from which
his ordinary habits are so universally supposed
to exclude him? Here, surely, is a new aspect
of the bachelor still left to be presented; and
here is a new subject for worn-out readers of
the nineteenth century whose fountain of
literary novelty has become exhausted at the
source.

Let me sketch the history—in anticipation of
a large and serious work which I intend to produce,
one of these days, on the same subject—
of the Bachelor Bedroom, in a certain comfortable
country house, whose hospitable doors fly
open to me with the beginning of summer, and
close no more until the autumn is ended. I
must beg permission to treat this interesting
topic from the purely human point of view. In
other words, I propose describing, not the Bedroom
itself, but the succession of remarkable
bachelors who have passed through it in my
time.

The hospitable country seat to which I refer
is Coolcup House, the residence of that enterprising
gentleman-farmer and respected chairman
of Quarter Sessions, Sir John Giles. Sir John's
Bachelor Bedroom has been wisely fitted up on
the ground floor. It is the one solitary sleeping
apartment in that part of the house. Fidgety
bachelors can jump out on to the lawn, at night,
through the bow-window, without troubling
anybody to unlock the front door; and can communicate
with the presiding genius of the cellar
by merely crossing the hall. For the rest, the
room is delightfully airy and spacious, and fitted
up with all possible luxury. It started in life,
under Sir John's careful auspices, the perfection
of neatness and tidiness. But the bachelors
have corrupted it long since. However care-