THE PULSE. just going to send him, said she, with a packet into that quarter, and if you will have the complaisance to step in, it will be ready in a moment, and he shall attend you to the place. So I walked in with her to the far side of the shop, and taking up the ruffle in my hand which she laid upon the chair, as if I had a mind to sit, she sat down her. self in her low chair, and I instantly set myself down beside her. - -He will be ready, Monsieur, said she, in a moment. And in that moment, replied I, most willingly would I say something very civil to you for all these courtesies. Any one may do a casual act of good nature, but a continuance of them shews it is a part of the temperature; and, certainly, added I, if it is the same blood which comes from the heart, which descends to the extremes (touching her wrist), I am sure you must have one of the best pulses of any woman in the world.-Feel it, said she, holding out her armSo laying down my hat, I took hold of her fingers with one hand, and applied the two forefingers of my other to the artery. Would to heaven! my dear Eugenius, thou hadst passed by, and beheld me sitting in my black coat, and in my lack-a-day-sical manner, counting the throbs of it, one by one, with as much true devotion as if I had been watching the critical ebb or How of her fever-how wouldst thou have laughed E PARIS. and moralized upon my new profession-and thou shouldest have laughed and moralized on— Trust me, my dear Eugenius, I should have said, "there are worse occupations in this world than feeling a woman's pulse."- -But a Grisset's! thou wouldst have said-and in an open shop! Yorick -So much the better: for when my views are direct, Eugenius, I care not if all the world saw me feel it. THE HUSBAND. PARIS. I HAD counted twenty pulsations, and was going on fast towards the fortieth, when her husband coming unexpected from a back parlour into the shop, but me a little out of my reckoning. 'Twas nobody but her husband, she said-so I began a fresh score.-Monsieur is so good, quoth she, as he passed by us, to give himself the trouble of feeling my pulse.-The husband took off his hat, and making me a bow, said, I did him too much honour-and having said that, he but on his hat and walked out. Good God! said I to myself, as he went outand can this man be the husband of this woman? Let it not torment the few who know what THE HUSBAND. must have been the grounds of this exclamation, if I explain it to those who do not. In London a shopkeeper and a shopkeeper's wife seem to be one bone and one flesh: in the several endowments of mind and body, sometimes the one, sometimes the other has it, so as in general to be upon a par, and to tally with each other as nearly as man and wife need to do. In Paris, there are scarce two orders of beings more different; for the legislative and executive powers of the shop not resting in the husband, he seldom comes there in some dark and dismal room behind, he sits commerceless in his thrum nightcap, the same rough son of Nature that Nature left him. The genius of a people where nothing but the monarchy is salique, having ceded this depart ment, with sundry others, totally to the womenby a continual higgling with customers of all ranks and sizes, from morning till night, like so many rough pebbles shook long together in a bag, by amicable collisions they have worn down their asperities and sharp angles, and not only become round and smooth, but will receive, some of them, a polish like a brilliant-Monsieur le Mari is little better than the stone under your foot 1 -Surely-surely, man! it is not good for thee to sit alone-thou wast made for social intercourse |