and thus incurs the whole responsibility of
their ruin. A load, be it remembered, which
it is all the heavier to bear because the
miserable boy who is the cause of all this
wretchedness, having to be sent as an only
resource to sea, the mother attributes that
misfortune too—a greater one to her than the
ruin which has made it necessary— to the ill
success of the father's speculation.

It was a delicate and charming touch—a
fine trait of feeling in the old porter, that in
his prosperous days, the crochets by the aid of
which he had earned so hard the means of
resting from his labours in his declining
years, were kept hung up in his room, in a
place where everyone who entered the house
must see them. Alas! the time has arrived
when they must come down from the wall
and take their place again upon his shoulders.
And when once more the old man—fearfully
altered,his modest bourgeois costume changed
for the patched and shabby dress of a
commissionaire, staggers across the stage with a
burden on his back which would be no light
one for a man of half his years—it was then
that the groans and cries of Dieu de Dieu!
from the audience rose to such a storm that
one half of the spectators was occupied in
trying to hush the other, that the performance
might be heard.

It is the sight of his father labouring thus
that greets the son on his return, after a
long absence, from sea. This is, perhaps, the
most powerful and distressing scene in the
whole drama. Also is it the last of its kind.
I remember that the play ends happily, and
that this ending is brought about by no
outrageous or clumsy machinery, but simply by
what is probable enough—that, by
prize-money and certain other strokes of fortune in
a sailor's career, the son has amassed enough
to secure the last years of his father and
mother from want, and so the crochets once
again may take their place against the wall.

All these things I remember then. Yet
such is the obtuseness or obliquity of my
moral sense—such the laxness of those
principles on which my friend Mr. Bull was good
enough to congratulate me—that in all this
I am unable to detect either vice or
immorality; but, on the contrary, about as strong
a protest against both the one and the other
as has been entered since the days of William
Hogarth and his idle apprentice.

"Well," said I to myself, having nobody
else to speak to, "I suppose, in the next play
I see, the inherent villany of the drama of
France will come out in all its naked hideousness.
I will go to-morrow to the Vaudeville,
and assist at the first representation of Le
Roman d'un Jeune Homme Pauvre."

THE corporal of Dragoons who sits next
me, and who has given hostages to the drama
at the playhouse-door, leaving there so many
of his accoutrements that his bulk is
diminished by about one-half, would astonish me
by his presence in an orchestra-stall; but
that knowing how completely it is a part of
the present system in France to pet the
army in every conceivable way, it would not
the least surprise me to hear that the
members of the military profession got their
places in the theatre for half the sum
demanded of their more peaceful countrymen.
I have, however, nothing to say against
my neighbour; but, on the contrary, am
proud to be able to state, that he was
extremely courteous and affable to me, though
he was a corporal, and I only a civilian; and
that he conversed freely with me between
the acts, making many guileless inquiries
relative to the manners and customs of the
English, which it was my agreeable duty to
answer in such French as I could command,
and with an ingenuous modesty.

What a house! What a country for the
arts! The people on the Place de la Bourse
to-day were talking about the new play
almost as much as about francs.

The corporal of Dragoons settled himself
in his place, with a deep-drawn breath of
prophetic satisfaction, as the curtain rose;
and I proceeded, for my part, to consider the
course of the play with close and critical
attention.

It is a good subject—poverty. And it is
before me here in one of its most disastrous
forms: the sudden poverty of one brought up
in luxury, and with the prospect before him
of a life in which even economy would be
unnecessary. This man—Maxime de
Champcey, a member of a good and ancient
house—finds at his father's death that the family
estate has, by a long series of imprudences
and misfortunes kept concealed from him,
been so deeply compromised, that he and his
little sister are left literally without a
farthing in the world. This sudden change
of circumstances, this unexpected contact
with want, in one who has never even thought
of the existence of poverty before, is a trial
of which those can form no conception who
have not seen the results of such tragedies.
I, for my part, have been brought in contact
with such things in more than one instance,
and have known a man, in the prime of
youth and health, who died of such a stroke
as this.

The rising of the curtain, then, discovers
Le jeune homme pauvre in the first misery
of a newly-discovered ruin. He is living in
a garret in the house which was once his
father's; and is at this particular moment,
owing to a pride which he cannot master,
and which forbids him to seek a temporary
assistance in the shape of a loan, in such
absolute want, that he is made acquainted with a
sensation—which those who read these words
have in all probability never known, and
which, let us hope, will ever remain practically
a secret to them—the sensation of
hunger, without any reasonable prospect of