among all those houses there is only one Old
Bailey to which law-breakers are sent to trial
from some half-dozen district police-courts—
that among millions of people there are but a
few hundred convicted criminals, and those
nursed chiefly in the lap of Ignorance—bred
blind. It is now many years since things
were at the worst in England, and they have
for a long time been mending. Every man of
us, in the whole journey through life from
the mother's lap, will have only his own ill
mood to blame if he does not encounter
friendly eyes, and feel the grasp of helping
hands, and recognise a world of goodness in
the men and women among whom he walks.
It is a rare thing to get stung by a rascal.
Of course, we may so choose our way as to be
constantly environed by rascality, as in a
country walk we may in mad perversity, if it
so pleases us, wade through the nettles. But
the country is no more a bed of nettles than
town is fairly to be called a nursery of vice.

A LAST EMOTION.

CAN there possibly exist a more blasé and
used-up being than the newspaper shorthand-
writer necessarily is. Robberies with
personal violence, or debates about the budget;
murders, or declarations of war; conspiracies,
or diplomatic revelations; separate
maintenances, or the law of divorce;—all is for
him merely raw material to go to work upon.
He has the entreé of private examinations, and
he never avails himself of the privilege. The
journals are not allowed to publish the
scandalous details which such occasions might
furnish them with, and he blesses the public
sense of decency which gives him thus a day
of respite. A day of respite, did I say? There
is no real respite for him; he can only enjoy a
change of judges, advocates, and means of
torture. From the Assises he passes to the
Correctional Police, where he colours the
slang of a titi, paraphrases the discourse of a
philosophic rag-picker, transforms for the
amusement of chambermaids a finished
vagabond into an old Austerlitz hero, and
revises and corrects, with considerable
additions, a cap-pulling, kerchief-tearing scene,
exactly as he will embellish bye and bye the
speeches of the Deputies with the most
perfumed flowers of parliamentary rhetoric.

Of all shorthand-writers in the world,
M. Prisetout was the most disillusionised,
the most disenchanted, the most hardened.
When he was in the act of exercising his
functions, had a thunderbolt fallen at his
feet, he would instantly have opened a
parenthesis, and written—[here, there falls
a thunderbolt]—without being more put
out by it, than I am now. And yet, after
twenty years' impassiveness and insensibility,
M. Prisetout did at last experience an
emotion.

When age had enfeebled the vigour of his
legs, M. Prisetout went, the very day of the
opening of the session, and chose a lodging
not far from the Palais Bourbon; exactly like
those peripatetic doctors, who quarter
themselves in the neighbourhood of their patients.
He hired, by the year, a bachelor's room at
the top of the Rue St. Dominique, where, as
he himself said, he annually went for six
months to the galleys. The Peyronnets and
the rest of the two-hundred and twenty-one
forgive him! Our stenographe, on departing
from each sitting, repaired to a restaurant of
the Rue de Bourgogne, where he put a little
order and clearness into his notes, sent them
off to his journals, dined copiously, and then
returned on foot to his cabin. The majority
of the modest mansions of this quarter were
inhabited at that time by old remnants of the
French army, and particularly by those who,
though riddled through and through with
wounds, desired to prove that their courage
did not lie in one line only, and had not even
shrunk from facing matrimony during their
declining days. In the house which M.
Prisetout had selected, and which looked out
upon the Esplanade of the Invalides, one of
these brave and happy couples lived upon the
same landing-place with himself. The only
room which constituted their lodging had
received them as their nuptial chamber, and
still served for dining-room and kitchen. On
entering this tranquil retreat, the first thing
you perceived was a large canopied bed in
good style, and of perfectly military
cleanliness. Over the double pillows there were
fixed, on the right a crucifix surmounted by a
branch of blessed box; on the left, a sword
and a sabre of honour, crosswise. Beneath
the former trophy was stuck a print of
St. Thècle, with the history of her life and
sufferings; under the second, there shone a
plaster bust of the Emperor, with a crown of
laurel over his little historic hat. These two
emblems denoted with sufficient clearness the
place which each spouse occupied in the
conjugal bed. Two state chairs, one on the
right, the other on the left of the bed,
completed the furniture, together with a large
carved wardrobe for linen, which many a
budding curiosity-collector would purchase
with a complete suite in mahogany.

The middle of the chamber was the dining-
room, and was occupied by a handsome high-
polished cistern, which shone like the lock of a
regimental gun, and by an open buffet wherein
plates, dishes, and a nice soup-tureen of pipe-
clay, were carefully ranged along the shelves.
On entering, you would have said they were
specimens of Bernard Palizzy on the
dunkerque of a dealer in bric-à-brac. The dishes
were to the right, the plates in the middle,
and the saucers to the left, forming a very
original chromatic gamut of crockery-ware.
A table, on which they ate and played cards,
stood in the centre of this dining-room.

The kitchen came next. A fire-place with
a vast mantle-piece, a broad shovel, a strong
pair of tongs, two majestic dog-irons, and a