Five hundred francs, four hundred and ninety,
eighty, and so down to three, two, one hundred,
and still the house gave no sign. Which was
rather a bad sign for me. The expert's first-
announced figure is generally somewhere near
what he, from his large experience, judges the
picture will really bring. When no one interrupts
such a gradation of tentatory falls as this,
the probability is that half a dozen persons are
watching and waiting each that the rest show
their hands first. This constantly-recurring
phenomenon is one of the many queerities of
the Hotel. " Come now! Anything you will;
dealer's price, prix de marchand, voyons!
Ninety? Eighty? But, gentlemen!— a ravishing
morceau— given for nothing— comes from
the gallery of Cardinal Fiasco, as you may see
from the seal with the cardinal hat on the back
of frame— voyons!" So cry, and exhort, and
announce, and objurgate the officials, till the
crier has rattled down to seventy-five. Echo
from the house answers, " Seventy-five." This is
what may be called the seed price, which swells
slowly by ones and twos to a hundred, where its
growth is arrested. Then the commissaire, who
has faith in its vitality, digs about it with his
hammer, and pours out round about it his
eloquence; and the expert takes a new look at
the picture, and has the air of discovering new
beauties and of confirming his original estimate
of its originality; and père Michel then asks to
see it, though he knows by heart its every line
and speck of dirt, and scans it with intense
keenness, veiled by thin indifference of manner,
and grafts a fresh five on the hundred. Say
now the present possessor of that chef-d'Å“uvre
enters into the strife, holding it safe to go along
with such a shrewd shop-dealer, whom he drives
off the track at one hundred and seventy-five,
and so hopes to have it. But some one two
rows of chairs behind, or a standing member in
the back of the house, or some other quidam
quite invisible to him, has established
communication with the wrong side of the tables, and
rises another ten. I am hurt and warming, so
I spring ten over him, angrily, perhaps fifteen:
hitchet a hatchet, up he goes, and up I, to two
hundred and fifty, seventy, eighty, and so on.
But I beat him in the end.

Here is the first enjoyment, which is of
triumph. Then I got it cheap, which is enjoyment
the second, ot economy mixed with subtler
ingredients. The pleasure of fishing or of gold-
hunting is not in the money-value of the fish or
of the nugget only; it is in the luck, in finding
a firm foothold to the strained tiptoe of hope,
instead of falling down, as was possible, on one's
heels again, or further, lower back. To state
the case arithmetically: You have bought to-day
a Spaventole or a Van Abscheusen for ten
pounds, which, rather than not have had, you
would have paid forty pounds; on your way
home from the scene of your triumph, your
pocket is picked of thirty pounds in money, or
of a watch of that value: this night you lie
down to rest an ever so much happier man than
though you had paid forty pounds for your
prize and had not had your pocket picked.
The third enjoyment is in the carrying home
of the picture— an enjoyment of which wealthy
amateurs and impersonal national galleries and
the like, who employ agents and porters, never
taste. You hold the precious object fast, and
warm, and proudly in your arms, like an
Erlking's daughter or the first-born heir of your
house. The very aching of your muscles, so
closely associated with the reward of the effort,
spices the pleasure. You slip along through
side-streets to get on the sooner to where you
can gloat in freedom over your treasure. You
feel for passengers you meet, who have no
Pittoraccios under their arms, the gratefully-
mingled sentiment of gratitude for your favoured
lot, and of cheap compassion creditable to your
humanity for their deprivations. You hurriedly
snatch the key from the concierge, mount the
stairs two at a time to your own door,
tremulously miss the keyhole for two minutes, and
are now at home. You set Pittoraccio on a
chair by the window, then on another chair by
another window; you try him, bis in idem, by
all the lights from sunrise to sundown, and by
lamp and candle; you hang him by the
bookcase, and cut him down to re-hang him by the
door, new merits of execution coming out at
every turn. Next you show him to your friends,
and consult them for opinions, which, if they
are persons of taste, are affirmative and
congratulatory.

That having lasted for a few days, then
come further enjoyments, the most exquisite of
all, to wit, the cleaning process, the removal of
the varnish, the almost discovery of a signature,
the complete discovery of the master's touch
and quality, and the crowning glory of
re-varnishing. But here words fail— like merchants
in a financial crisis, at the very moment when
need is sorest— and I shut up shop.

Although further consideration and comparison
have led me to the conviction that the
so-called Sainte Zitella of Pittoraccio is a
burgomaster's wife by Van Schmieren, the real
value of that chef-d'Å“uvre is rather increased
than diminished by the change of attribution.

THE UNCOMMERCIAL TRAVELLER,
A New Series of Occasional Papers
By CHARLES DICKENS,
WILL BE CONTINUED NEXT WEEK.

Now ready, bound in cloth, price 5s. 6d.,
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