formed of waiting on the Black Mesmerist,
and to incline towards the expediency of
remaining where I was. Indeed a point of
gallantry was involved in my doing so,
inasmuch as I had not left France alone, but had
come from the prisons of St. Pélagic with my
distinguished and unfortunate friend Madame
Roland (in two volumes which I bought for
two francs each, at the book-stall in the
Place de la Concorde, Paris, at the corner
of the Rue Royale). Deciding to pass the
evening tête-à-tête with Madame Roland, I
derived, as I always do, great pleasure from
that spiritual woman's society, and the
charms of her brave soul and engaging
conversation. I must confess that if she had
only some more faults, only a few more
passionate failings of any kind, I might love her
better; but I am content to believe that the
deficiency is in me, and not in her. We spent
some sadly interesting hours together on this
occasion, and she told me again of her cruel
discharge from the Abbaye, and of her being
re-arrested before her free feet had sprung
lightly up half-a-dozen steps of her own
staircase, and carried off to the prison which
she only left for the guillotine.

Madame Roland and I took leave of one
another before midnight, and I went to bed
full of vast intentions for next day, in
connexion with the unparalleled chapter. To
hear the foreign mail-steamers coming in at
dawn of day, and to know that I was not
aboard or obliged to get up, was very
comfortable; so, I rose for the chapter in great
force.

I had advanced so far as to sit down at my
window again on my second morning, and to
write the first half-line of the chapter and
strike it out, not liking it, when my conscience
reproached me with not having surveyed
the watering-place out of the season,
after all, yesterday, but with having gone
straight out of it at the rate of four miles and
a half an hour. Obviously the best amends
that I could make for this remissness was to
go and look at it without another moment's
delay. So—altogether as a matter of duty—
I gave up the magnificent chapter for another
day, and sauntered out with my hands in my
pockets.

All the houses and lodgings ever let to
visitors, were to let that morning. It seemed
to have snowed bills with To Let upon them.
This put me upon thinking what the owners
of all those apartments did, out of the season;
how they employed their time, and occupied
their minds. They could not be always
going to the Methodist chapels, of which I
passed one every other minute. They must
have some other recreation. Whether they
pretended to take one another's lodgings, and
opened one another's tea-caddies in fun?
Whether they cut slices off their own beef
and mutton, and made believe that it be-
longed to somebody else? Whether they
played little dramas of life, as children do,
and said, " I ought to come and look at your
apartments, and you ought to ask two guineas
a-week too much, and then I ought to say I
must have the rest of the day to think of it,
and then you ought to say that another lady
and gentleman with no children in family
had made an offer very close to your own
terms, and you had passed your word to give
them a positive answer in half-an-hour, and
indeed were just going to take the bill down
when you heard the knock, and then I ought
to take them, you know "? Twenty such
speculations engaged my thoughts. Then,
after passing, still clinging to the walls,
defaced rags of the bills of last year's Circus,
I came to a back field near a timber-yard
where the Circus itself had been, and where
there was yet a sort of monkish tonsure on the
grass, indicating the spot where the young
lady had gone round upon her pet steed Firefly
in her daring flight. Turning into the town
again, I came among the shops, and they
were emphatically out of the season. The
chemist had no boxes of ginger-beer powders,
no beautifying sea-side soaps and washes, no
attractive scents; nothing but his great
goggle-eyed red bottles, looking as if the
winds of winter and the drift of the salt-sea
had inflamed them. The grocers' hot pickles,
Harvey's Sauce, Doctor Kitchener's Zest,
Anchovy Paste, Dundee Marmalade, and the
whole stock of luxurious helps to appetite,
were hybernating somewhere under-ground.
The china-shop had no trifles from anywhere.
The Bazaar had given in altogether, and
presented a notice on the shutters that this
establishment would re-open at Whitsuntide,
and that the proprietor in the meantime
might be heard of at Wild Lodge, East Cliff.
At the Sea-bathing Establishment, a row of
neat little wooden houses seven or eight feet
high, I saw the proprietor in bed in the
shower-bath. As to the bathing-machines,
they were (how they got there, is not for me
to say) at the top of a hill at least a mile and
a half off. The library, which I had never
seen otherwise than wide open, was tight
shut; and two peevish bald old gentlemen
seemed to be hermetically sealed up inside,
eternally reading the paper. That wonderful
mystery, the music-shop, carried it off as
usual (except that it had more cabinet pianos
in stock), as if season or no season were all
one to it. It made the same prodigious
display of bright brazen wind-instruments,
horribly twisted, worth, as I should conceive,
some thousands of pounds, and which it is
utterly impossible that anybody in any season
can ever play or want to play. It had five
triangles in the window, six pairs of
castanets, and three harps; likewise every polka
with a colored frontispiece that ever was
published; from the original one where a smooth
male and female Pole of high rank are coming
at the observer with their arms a-kimbo, to the
Ratcatcher's Daughter. Astonishing establishmment,
amazing enigma! Three other shops