possibility of any votary of the blind goddess (who
sees much belter athwart her bandage than we
give her credit for) rendered desperate by a
continuous run of ill-luck, flinging his hat violently
at the dealer (as a speaker of the Irish House of
Commons is said to have once flung his wig at
the head of an orator who wouldn't leave off), or
running a croupier through with a sword-cane.
lf acquaintances wished to chat, or to argue,
they went into an ante-chamber, or into the
supper-room. The solemn and powdered lacqueys
who stole about with cards and pins for
calculating punters (who, knowing every probability
of the game save one, and, failing the knowledge
of that, were beggared), appeared to glide in list
slippers. The whole place wore a calm and
peaceful aspect, most beautiful to the
philosopher. There was no wailing, no gnashing of
teeth, no tearing of hair, no stamping of feet.
When human wickedness is concentrated on one
particular object, and all its faculties are
remorselessly perverted and bent, with diabolical
strength of volition towards the attainment of
one particular end, human wickedness is apt to
be very quiet indeed. Guy Fawkes did not
whistle at his work, you may be sure. The
administration of strychnine is not a comic song.

It occurred one morning during this ultimate
gala time, this "Vauxhall closing for ever"
season of Frascati's, to two gentlemen, both
known by name and character to the readers of
this chronicle (although of one its sight and
cognisance have been lost for a considerable period),
to look in at the corner of the Rue de Richelieu
and try their luck upon the red and the black.

One was a very old friend, and he had grown,
to be a very old man. It is nearly fourteen years
since we last met him. His hair was still black,
but it was the hair of a wig, and not of a living
head. His whiskers were ragged and sparse, and
these, together with a bristly moustache he had
recently grown, were ill dyed, and the white
showed athwart the purple, like cotton in a
fraudulent fabric of silk. His teeth, which were
wont to gleam so beautifully, were now only a
few irregular broken and discoloured fangs. His
face was haggard, yet unduly puffed and swollen
about the jaws, and in many places blotched with
purple. It was easy to detect, without turning
down his eyelid or inhaling his breath, that he
drank. He snuffed, too, in every place where he
was not allowed to smoke. He had come to that
age when a naughty old man wants every kind of
stimulant, and rushes down-hill by half a dozen
parallel roads. His attire was shabby and his
linen cloudy; his trousers were patched, and the
lustre on his hat was due, half to grease and half to
the recent application of a wet brush. You could
see the hole in his left boot, where he had inked
his stocking to conceal the whiteness of the
orifice. In one hand he dangled a dingy yellow
glove, which had no fellow; from his dexter
wrist dangled by a string, a loaded walking-stick,
which was more like a bludgeon. But it would
be unpardonable to omit the fact that he wore
spurs, dimly lacquered, and that his frayed
and eraseous stock was fastened with a sham
carbuncle pin, price one franc twenty-five
centimes in the Galerie Vivienne, and unavailable at
the Mont de Piété.

This was all that was left of the fashionable
Mr. Francis Blunt. The glories of the
Horticultural fête, Gamridge's Hotel, the cabriolet and
the tiger, the body-servant and the chambers
in town, the watches, the rings, the scent and
cambric, and the cut velvet waistcoats, had all
come down to this. It would be wearisome to
dwell on all the details of a career towards the
dogs, which had continued with brief
intermissions of prosperity for fourteen years. It
would be sullying this page with the shabbiest
and sorriest of chronicles. His instincts had
always been canine, and the dogs had him at last.
It was a natural culmination. It was only what
might have been expected. Hundreds of spirits
as dashing, as fashionable, as accomplished, had
so subsided into decrepitude, and drifted into
extinction. The brilliant butterfly had become
the dirtiest of grubs again. He was but one of
a motley, brilliant, worthless million.

But if you want the rapidest coup d' œil—the
most comprehensive bird's-eye view—here it is.
A thousand table d'hôte dinners (many of them
on credit), and a thousand days passed outside
cook-shops, with nothing to eat. Thousands of
bottles of wine, some paid for, some to which he
had been treated, many which he had cozened
innkeepers out of. Much brandy, many cigars;
hecatombs of card-packs, legions of billiard-
matches, a sack full of loaded dice, a shower of
stamped paper, bearing his name, now as drawer,
now as acceptor, now as endorser. An
occasional appearance in the English Insolvent
Debtors' Court; one or two proclamations of
outlawry; a ream of begging letters; a host of
unpaid tailors; several bevies of bayadères, and
worse; half a dozen convictions for escroquerie
entailing lengthened residences in French, in
Belgian, and in German jails; a few duels, more
numerous canings and horsewhippings. Behold
it all. He had ridden in carriages-and-four, and
he had been kicked down stairs; he had danced
at balls and run away from landlords; he had
been drunken and gay, and sick and in hospitals;
but the route had been always downward, and
it had come to this at last. And, as the Sibyl
enhanced day by day the price of her portentous
volumes, while they were diminished in number,
even so did Mr. Francis Blunt require every day
more brandy, and derive a smaller amount of
comfort from that down-hill cordial.

His circle of existence was narrowing.
Mephistopheles' poodle was tracing more involved
concentrics round him. The moral halter was
tightening. He dared not show himself in
London, in Brussels, at the German watering-
places. Out of a dozen former friends whom he
would meet by chance, not ten, not eleven, but
just the whole dozen, would cut him. When his
name was mentioned, it was not as "poor devil"