because the glitter pleases him, and you know
the gold to be pure: wait for the tenth! I
think that you will find that old battered ring
of well-chewed India rubber quite good enough
for Decimus, for all that he is the finest of the
lot and the most beautiful: " Sitting up like a
king," says nurse, at an age when, by natural
rights, his head should be hung upon damaged
springs, with his backbone a mere line of
gristle, jointed secundum artem. You have
learnt the core of motherhood by this time, and
can dispense with pigments.

Paint and varnish, on the hands and lips of the
fashionable physician, who declares, my dear
madam, that you are all nerves, the most sensitive
creature alive,needingwithtenderness a perpetual
change of air and amusement; when all you want,
my dear madam, is a severe course of the Whole
Duty of Man, and some little skill in mastering
a refractory temper. Paint and varnish on the
lawn bands of the fashionable preacher thundering
against vulgar vices, not likely to assail his
well-bred congregation, but salving delicately over
those to which by nature and position they are
prone; paint and varnish on the barrister defending
an unsavoury cause— on the attorney making
black seem white, and smudging over white with
pailfuls of forensic ink; paint and varnish on
the politician talking bunkum on the hustings,
or nonsense in the House— on schoolmasters and
schoolmistresses writing their half-yearly reports
to the parents— on testimonials— on quack
advertisements, with their respectable vouchers.
Paint and varnish, indeed, on nine-tenths of
our modern life: the real thing covered up and
hidden, and no honest showing forth of difficulties
or blemishes, of weak spots or of splinters.
And though a fair outside is a grace, yet when
the whole thing is outside, we may be excused for
longing earnestly for something solid within, and
for relegating paint and varnish to the limbo of
shams insupportable to honest human souls.

BETWEEN TWO FIRES.

In the autumn after the election of the
present Napoleon to the French Presidency, law
business of importance took me to Châlons, the
well known central station on the great
Chemin-de-Fer de l'Est, that joins Paris to Strasbourg.

A valuable estate near Luneville had been left
to my ward, Mademoiselle Eloïse Espinasse,
the year before, by her uncle: a rich manufacturer
of Lyons, whose affairs, thanks to the
rascality of a lawyer at Bar-le-Duc, had become so
embarrassed and in such a frightful state of
confusion, as to require my personal attention. It
was important that I should help my agent,
Monsieur Fabrice Rouget, of Châlons, to
disentangle the difficulties and defeat the mean arts
and subtle machinations of the pettifogger whom
we had combined to expose and to defeat.

Nine weary days I passed at Châlons,
toiling over chests of dusty parchments, and
trying to master the intricacies of French
provincial law. O what muddy seas of mediæval
lore did not that wearisome M. Rouget plunge me
into! What endless harangues did he not
deliver on the former frontiers of Poitou and
Guienne! What hateful and irrelevant discussions
did he not lead me into, about feudal rights,
military tenure, soccage, and the Salic law!
Whether he purposely intended to confuse me,
whether he was unable to explain the provincial
law, or whether he wished to make an endless
Penelope's web of the whole business, I could
not decide.

All I was certain of, was, that at the end of the
third day I got very irritable at the tedious way
in which French provincial lawyers managed their
affairs, and devoted to the infernal gods M.
Rouget, mediæval law, Châlons, and the
Latouche estate. I devoted to the same gloomy
deities, all those dull-eyed pedants and obscure
legal writers who hid themselves, like the
pursued cuttle-fish, in clouds of ink and water;
who would not set down a plain thing plainly, or
a brief thing briefly, but who went on shaving
and shaving at a simple enunciation of justice
until they had reduced it to as many slices as
an eating-house ham.

But let me describe my tormentor, M. Rouget.
He was a thin fleshless man of fifty, who
rendered his natural pallor more perfectly corpse-like
by always wearing a badly-cut seedy suit of black.
I suppose he had eyes, but I really never particularly
saw them, as he always wore huge green,
spectacles of the sort offensively denominated
"goggles"— blinkers, in fact, rimmed with blue
steel, and glassed in like miniature railway
danger-signals. If his eyes showed at all inside
these green caverns, they showed no more than
the wick of a caudle shows, inside a horn-
lantern. By no bold front view, by no stealthy
side view, of those eyes, could I discover any
expression in them. M. Rouget might be dying
of ophthalmia; but, for all that, those hideous
spectacles had much the effect of intentional
masks until the candles were lighted or the
gaslight fell on them; and then they struck me as
resembling the two lamps that you see on an
advancing express train.

Yet, wno could be afraid of such a living
corpse, such a legal Lazarus, with his flabby
uncertain walk, his restless imbecile shuffling
manner, and his thin tremulous yellow lips?
Why, one blow from the shoulder would have
killed him; with one grip of my hand I could
have flattened him against his wall of deed
boxes; with one wrestling throw I could have
dashed him through his office-window into the
cathedral court-yard below.

This was almost my nightly train of thought,
as at nightfall I left the great ecclesiastical
lawyer of Châlons, and paced slowly back to my
hotel. The very suspicion I felt to be a sort of
crime, for M. Rouget had overwhelmed me with
attentions. I had been literally feted at Châlons.
It had been all I could do, to remain at the
hotel; and not take up my quarters with my
French colleague.

I bore this entanglement, intentional or
unintentional, pretty well, for nine days. It is my