his pillow, she bent over his head and
kissed him gently on the forehead.

Père Panpan—I had come by degrees to
call him " Père," although he was still young;
for it sounded natural and kindly
continued his narrative in his rambling,
gossiping way. He had been chosen, he said, to
serve in the Garde Royale, of whom fifteen
thousand sabres were stationed in and about
the capital at this period; and in the royal
forest of Fontainebleau, in the enjoyment
of a sort of indolent activity, he passed
his happiest days; now employed in the
chase, now in the palace immediately about
the person of the king, in a succession of
active pleasures, or easy, varied duties.
Panpan was no republican. Indeed, I question
whether any very deep political principles
governed his sentiments; which naturally
allied themselves with those things that
yielded the greatest amount of pleasure.

The misfortunes of Père Panpan dated
from the revolution of eighteen hundred and
thirty. Then the glittering pageantry in the
palace of Fontainebleau vanished like a dream.
The wild clatter of military preparation; the
rattling of steel and the trampling of horses;
and away swept troop after troop, with swordbelt
braced and carabine in hand, to plunge
into the mad uproar of the streets of Paris,
risen, stones and all, in revolution. The Garde
Royale did their duty in those three terrible
days, and if their gallant charges through
the encumbered streets, or their patient
endurance amid the merciless showers of
indescribable missiles, were all in vain, it was
because their foe was animated by an
enthusiasm of which they knew nothing,
save in the endurance of its effects. Panpan's
individual fate, amid all this turmoil, was
lamentable enough.

A few hours amid the dust; the swelling
heat; the yellings of the excited populace;
the roaring of cannon and the pattering of
musketry; saw the troop in which he served,
broken and scattered, and Panpan himself
rolling in the dust, with a thousand lights
flashing in his eyes, and a brass button
lodged in his side!

"Those villains of Parisians! " he
exclaimed, "not content with showering their
whole garde meuble upon our heads, fired
upon us a diabolical collection of missiles,
such as no mortal ever thought of before:
—bits of broken brass; little plates of tin
and iron rolled into sugar-loaves; crushed
brace-buckles; crooked nails and wads of
metal wire;—anything, indeed, that in their
extremity they could lay their hands on, and
ram into the muzzle of a gun! These
things inflicted fearful gashes, and, in many
cases, a mere flesh-wound turned out a
death-stroke. Few that got hurt in our own troop
lived to tell the tale."

A few more days and the whole royal
cavalcade was scattered like chaff before the
wind, and Charles the Tenth a fugitive on his
way to England; a few more days and the
wily Louis Philippe was taking the oath to a
new constitution, and our friend, Panpan, lay
carefully packed, brass button and all, in the
Hôtel-Dieu. The brass-button was difficult
to find, and when found, the ugly fissure it
had made grew gangrened, and would not
heal; and thus it happened that many a bed
became vacant, and got filled, and was vacant
again, as their occupants either walked out, or
were borne out, of the hospital gates, before
Panpan was declared convalescent, and
finally dismissed from the Hôtel-Dieu as
"cured."

The proud trooper was, however, an
altered man; his health and spirits were
gone; the whole corps of which he had so
often boasted was broken up and dispersed;
his means of livelihood were at an end, and
what was worse he knew of no other exercise
of which he could gain his daily bread. There
were very many such helpless, tradeless men
pacing the streets of Paris, when the fever
of the revolution was cooled down, and ordinary
business ways began to take their
course. Nor was it those alone who were
uninstructed in any useful occupation, but
there were also the turbulent, dissatisfied
spirits; builders of barricades, and leaders of
club-sections, whom the late excitement, and
their temporary elevation above their fellow-
workmen, had left restless and ambitious, and
whose awakened energies, if not directed to
some useful and congenial employment, would
infallibly lead to mischief.

Panpan chuckled over the fate which
awaited some of these ardent youths: " Ces
gaillards là! " he said, " had become too
proud and troublesome to be left long in the
streets of Paris; they would have fomented
another revolution, so Louis Philippe, under
pretence of rewarding his brave 'soldats
laboureurs,' whom he was ready to shake by
the hand in the public streets in the first
flush of success, enrolled them in the army,
and sent them to the commanding officers
with medals of honour round their necks,
and special recommendations to promotion
in their hands. They hoped to become
Marshals of France in no time. Pauvres diables!
they were soon glad to hide their decorations,
and cease bragging about street-fighting and
barricades, for the regulars relished neither
their swaggering stories nor the notion of
being set aside by such parvenus; and they
got so quizzed, snubbed, and tormented, that
they were happy at last to slide into their
places as simple soldats, and trust to the
ordinary course of promotion."

As for Panpan, his street wanderings
terminated in his finding employment in a
lace-manufactory, and it soon became evident that
his natural talent here found a congenial
occupation. He came by degrees to be happy
in his new position of a workman. Then
occurred the serious love passage of his life—