of the house, and she stood there in her shabby
black clothes looking at nothing but the rising
waves for a whole hour by the clock. When
people are so lost in thought as that, I don't
seem to think that their meditations are
generally over happy ones.

I always felt, from the moment when Mr.
Broadhead was sent for, that I should never be
able to bring what I have to say about my lodgers
to a proper ending. I knew as well as
possible that I should have to stop sudden. That's
one of the things which I cannot understand,
how people can end anything, be it a letter
or what not, without stopping sudden. And
so here's health and long life to all, and if
any lodgers, so long as they're not scampish
ones who may read these words, are in want of
a pleasant residence facing the sea, and as open
at the back as need be, let them come down to
Bastings, and inquire for Martha Bee-flat. Not
that I need say anything in praise either of
myself or Bastings, for I am scarcely ever empty.

THE LAST OF THE LAST LEWISES.

We are told when the unhappy "desired"
king was sent away bloodily from the world,
that Monseigneur the Count of Provence—plain
"Sir" he was usually called—the king's
brother, immediately issued his proclamation from
an obscure corner of Westphalia. A magniloquent
document, characteristic to the last degree,
and truly Bourbon, which set out with a flourish
of this sort: "Louis Stanislas Xavier of France,
Son of France, Regent of the Kingdom, to all
whom these presents shall come, greeting!"
with copious fanfaronade as to the duties laid
on him "by the immutable laws of the French
monarchy." It proceeds to lay down a sort of
programme that reads very comically and
Bourbonish, distinguished with a primo and secundo,
and a tertio; so as to keep all distinct and accurate.
"We" constitute ourselves regent of the
kingdom—at least over all "whom it may
concern;" and have in view, primo, the rescue of
the young king, and, secundo, the punishment of
the "ferocious usurper," and, tertio, the delegation
of powers to "our dearly beloved brother,
Charles Philippe de France, whom we have
nominated and appointed Lieutenant-General of
the Kingdom." This precious document collapses
suddenly at the end, in unbecoming bathos. For
it is "given under our ordinary sign manual,
and seal, which we shall use in all acts of
sovereignly until the seals of the kingdom,
destroyed by faction, have been renewed." A watch
seal, it is to be feared, was the prosaic substitute,
and we can look into the little chamber and see
the pantomimists at their work—the watch seal
being solemnly afiixed by "the Regent" in
presence of "the Lieutenant-General of the
Kingdom," and of the "Ministers of State."

We dare not laugh at these comic doings, for
it remains a fact that this miserable gasconade
actually hurried on the death of the wretched
boy, who was still a hostage in the hands of his
jailors. It was a dear sacrifice to make for that
sellish putting on of a theatrical crown and
tinsel green-room finery. This would have been
criminal in common organisations; but for that
dull cerebral sap which fills Bourbon crania we
must have indulgence. This, however, remains
certain—their mummery was the death of little
Capet.

Learn nothing, forget nothing, should have
been the motto on that watch seal. Wise, witty
ex-Bishop Talleyrand; he knew them well. They
will learn nothing and forget nothing, until——
Not so long back, the writer of this has been told
by one who paid his respects to another of these
theatricals, who calls himself Henry the Fifth,
and who, we may take it, has a provisional watch
seal also, that this sham monarch received a
number of faithful gentlemen in his garden of a
freezing morning, and actually kept them walking
up and down with him listening to his royal
observations with their hats off.

Do what we will it is impossible not to think
of him as a sort of transpontine Lewis—a sort
of Bourbon minor actor—playing upon Royal
Victoria boards of his own. He is for ever "striking"
an attitude of the muscular and melodramatic
flavour, and, having made his point, stands in
his curls and fillet and royal pink fleshings,
waiting the expected burst of applause.
Perhaps, could we have stood near enough to listen,
the royal accents would have fallen into the
traditional husky cadences, condoling with the
Duchess d'Angoulême as his "chee-ild," and
denouncing, in language of severe reprehension,
all persons who were disinclined to fly to the
aid of females in distress.

Thus, when he is peeping out very cautiously
from afar off, as it were over the blinds, from a
mean little chamber in Verona, where he had
been given shelter, waiting—a sort of Bourbon
Micawber—for something to turn up—that
something being a crown—news arrives post of poor
little Capet's being worried out ot the world.
And straight some noble pauper gentlemen, also
on their keeping from the Jacobin bailiffs, repair
to the little chamber, and raise a feeble cry of
"Ave Cæsar!" "Long live Louis the
Eighteenth!" You see, by the canons of legitimacy
and divine right, if there had been fatal
omission of this great form, the mischief would
have been prodigious; and Cæsar, stepping
forward, proceeds to "strike" a favourite
Victoria attitude, and acknowledges the compliment
gracefully. As a matter of course, there was some
fine writing on the occasion, and a few cabinet
ministers of the older and more respectable
courts were bored by the receipt of some solemn
long-winded proclamations, announcing the
succession to the throne of the new king, in a little
salon in Verona.

By-and-by, as a certain fighting captain, whom
he afterwards thought it a fine pride to call
"M. Bonaparte," was spreading his terrors over a yet
larger area, the Doge, who allowed him shelter
in his alsatia, began to grow a little uneasy, and
with a gross indifference to divine right, hinted