"You will be good to my poor husband.
You will do him no harm. You will help me to
see him if you can?"

"Your husband is not my business here,"
returned Madame Defarge, looking down at her
with perfect composure. "It is the daughter
of your father who is my business here."

"For my sake, then, be merciful to my
husband. For my child's sake! She will put her
hands together and pray you to be merciful.
We are more afraid of you than of these
others."

Madame Defarge received it as a compliment,
and looked at her husband. Defarge, who had
been uneasily biting his thumb-nail and looking
at her, collected his face into a sterner
expression.

"What is it that your husband says in that
little letter?" asked Madame Defarge, with a
lowering smile. "Influence; he says something
touching influence?"

"That my father," said Lucie, hurriedly
taking the paper from her breast, but with her
alarmed eyes on her questioner and not on it,
"has much influence around him."

"Surely it will release him!" said Madame
Defarge. "Let it do so."

"As a wife and mother," cried Lucie, most
earnestly, "I implore you to have pity on me
and not to exercise any power that you possess,
against my innocent husband, but to use it in
his behalf. O sister-woman, think of me. As a
wife and mother!"

Madame Defarge looked, coldly as ever, at
the suppliant, and said, turning to her friend The
Vengeance:

"The wives and mothers we have been used
to see, since we were as little as this child, and
much less, have not been greatly considered?
We have known their husbands and fathers
laid in prison and kept from them, often
enough? All our lives, we have seen our
sister-women suffer, in themselves and in their
children, poverty, nakedness, hunger, thirst,
sickness, misery, oppression and neglect of all
kinds?"

"We have seen nothing else," returned The
Vengeance.

"We have borne this a long time," said
Madame Defarge, turning her eyes again upon
Lucie. "Judge you! Is it likely that the trouble
of one wife and mother would be much to us
now?"

She resumed her knitting and went out. The
Vengeance followed. Defarge went last, and
closed the door.

"Courage, my dear Lucie," said Mr. Lorry,
as he raised her. "Courage, courage! So far
all goes well with us—much, much better than
it has of late gone with many poor souls.
Cheer up, and have a thankful heart."

"I am not thankless, I hope, but that dreadful
woman seems to throw a shadow on me and on
all my hopes."

"Tut, tut!" said Mr. Lorry; "what is this
despondency in the brave little breast? A
shadow indeed! No substance in it, Lucie."

But the shadow of the manner of these
Defarges was dark upon himself, for all that, and
in his secret mind it troubled him greatly.

MELONS.

THERE can be little doubt that the coach
which conveyed Cinderella to the prince's ball
was not a pumpkin, but a Cantaloup melon.
The hypothesis is supported by a variety of
reasons. Imprimis:——But first of all, perhaps,
we ought to say a few words about the melons
themselves.

Although Cinderella is now a tolerably old
girl, we may assume that melons are considerably
older. The "lodge in a garden of cucumbers"
of the Scriptures was most probably a lodge in
a garden of melons, with perhaps a mixture of
water-melons. Cucumis is the generic name of
all melons, pumpkins, and cucumbers. ??????
or ?????, sikuos or sikus, is also Greek for the
same. The Latin word melo, whence our melon,
comes (etymologists say) from the Greek ?????,
melon, an apple, to which our fruit bears a
distant resemblance in form and perfume.
Palladius, who has left twelve books on the ancient
Roman agriculture of his time, has a chapter on
the culture of melons proper. Our pompion,
pumpion, and pumpkin, are modern forms of the
Latin pepo, which is a modification of the Greek
?????, pepon, sweet or ripe. "When cucumbers
attain an excessive magnitude," says Pliny,
"they are called pepones;" he therefore uses the
word melopepo to describe a sort of pompion
resembling a quince in its powerful odour and
its warty outside. By the way, melomelum, a
sweeting apple, is the origin of our word
marmalade. Our horticultural forefathers employed
"musk melon" to distinguish veritable melons
from pumpkins that had no musky smell; which
said pumpkins were, of old, called by the early
gardeners and are still called by the English
peasantry, millons and meellons. It will thus
be seen that the names, like the fruits, of the
great pumpkin family, alter their form and their
radical quality by such slight gradations as to
render it difficult to draw the line between them.

Gourds, together with the French "courge"
and the Dutch "kauwaerde," from quite a
different verbal root, are pumpkins of great variety
of form, size, and properties. There are the
Hercules or club-gourd, the calabash and
bottle-gourd, whose outer rinds, when thoroughly ripe,
dry, and hard, are made to serve for water-vessels,
bottles, and powder-flasks. Some of
these are eaten in their immature state, but it
is wiser to label untried sorts, raised from
imported seed, with a ticket marked BEWARE!
although their mawkish taste will generally
prove a sufficient safeguard. In hot climates
the club-gourd attains the enormous length of five
or six feet. In a few weeks, if well watered, it
forms shady arbours, under which the people of
the East squat and smoke. When the fruit is
young it hangs down inside the arbour like
candles. In this state it is cut, boiled with