scarce made the conjecture, when La Fleur, with an infinite humility, but with a look of trust, as if I should not refuse him, begg'd I would grant him the day, pour faire le galant vis-à-vis de sa maitresse.

Now it was the very thing I intended to do myself vis-à-vis Madame de R****.-I had retained the remise on purpose for it, and it would not have mortified my vanity to have had a servant so well dress'd as La Fleur was, to have got up behind it: I could have worse spared him.

never

But we must feel, not argue, in these embarrassments;—the sons and daughters of Service part with liberty, but not with nature, in their contracts; they are flesh and blood, and have their little vanities and wishes in the midst of the house of bondage, as well as their task-masters;-no doubt, they have set their self-denials at a price,-and their expectations are so unreasonable, that I would often disappoint them, but that their condition puts it so much in my power to do it.

Behold, Behold, I am the servant,-disarms me at once of the powers of a master.

-Thou shalt go, La Fleur, said I.

-And what mistress, La Fleur, said I, canst thou have pick'd up in so little a time at Paris ?-La Fleur laid his hand upon his breast, and said, 'Twas a petite demoiselle at Monsieur le Count de B****'s.- La Fleur had a heart made for society; and, to speak the truth of him, let as few occasions slip him as his Master, that somehow or other, but how,-Heaven knows, he had connected himself with the demoiselle upon the landing of the staircase, during the time I was taken up with my passport; and as there was time enough for me to win the Count to my interest, La Fleur had contrived to make it do to win the maid to his. The family, it seems, was to be at Paris that day, and he had made a party with her,

and two or three more of the Count's household, upon the boulevards.

Happy people! that once a week at least are sure to lay down all your cares together, and dance and sing and sport away the weights of grievance, which bow down the spirit of other nations to the earth.

THE FRAGMENT.

PARIS.

LA FLEUR had left me something to amuse myself with for the day more than I had bargain'd for, or could have entered either into his head or mine.

He had brought the little print of butter upon a currant leaf; and, as the morning was warm, and he had a good step to bring it, he had begg'd a sheet of waste paper to put betwixt the currant leaf and his hand. As that was plate sufficient, I bade him lay it upon the table as it was; and as I resolved to stay within all day, I ordered him to call upon the traiteur, to bespeak my dinner, and leave me to breakfast by myself.

When I had finished the butter, I threw the currant leaf out of the window, and was going to do the same by the waste paper ;-but stopping to read a line first, and that drawing me on to a second and third, -I thought it better worth; so I shut the window, and drawing a chair up to it, I sat down to read it.

It was in the old French of Rabelais's time; and, for aught I know might have been wrote by him :it was moreover in a Gothic letter, and that so faded and gone off by damps and length of time, it cost me

infinite trouble to make any thing of it.—I threw it down; and then wrote a letter to Eugenius,-then I took it up again, and embroiled my patience with it afresh; and then, to cure that, I wrote a letter to Eliza.-Still it kept hold of me; and the difficulty of understanding it increased but the desire.

I got my dinner; and after I had enlightened my mind with a bottle of Burgundy, I at it again;-and after two or three hours poring upon it, with almost as deep attention as ever Gruter or Jacob Spon did upon a nonsensical inscription, I thought I made sense of it; but to make sure of it, the best way, imagined, was to turn it into English, and see how it would look then!- -so I went on leisurely as a trifling man does, sometimes writing a sentence,then taking a turn or two,-and then looking how the world went, out of the window; so that it was nine o'clock at night before I had done it.-I then began and read it as follows:—

THE FRAGMENT.

PARIS.

-Now as the Notary's wife disputed the point with the Notary with too much heat,-I wish, said the Notary (throwing down the parchment) that there was another Notary here, only to set down and attest all this.

-And what would you do then, Monsieur ? said she, rising hastily up.- The Notary's wife was a little fume of a woman, and the Notary thought it well to avoid a hurricane by a mild reply.-I would

go, answered he, to bed-You may go to the Devil, answer'd the Notary's wife.

Now there happening to be but one bed in the house, the other two rooms being unfurnished, as is the custom at Paris, and the Notary not caring to lie in the same bed with a woman who had but that moment sent him pell-mell to the Devil, went forth with his hat and cane and short cloak, the night being very windy, and walk'd out ill at ease towards the Pont Neuf.

Of all the bridges which ever were built, the whole world who have pass'd over the Pont Neuf must own, that it is the noblest,-the finest,-the grandest, the lightest,-the longest,-the broadest that ever conjoined land and land together upon the face of the terraqueous globe.-

By this it seems as if the author of the frag-, ment had not been a Frenchman.

The worst fault which Divines and the Doctors of the Sorbonne can allege against it is, that if there is but a cap-full of wind in or about Paris, 'tis more blasphemously sacre Dieu'd there than in any other aperture of the whole city,-and with reason, good and cogent, Messieurs; for it comes against you without crying garde d'eau, and with such unpremeditable puffs, that of the few who cross it with their hats on, not one in fifty but hazards two livres and a half, which is its full worth.

The poor Notary, just as he was passing by the sentry, instinctively clapp'd his cane to the side of it; but in raising it up, the point of his cane catching hold of the loop of the sentinel's hat, hoisted it over the spikes of the balustrade clear into the Seine.

'Tis an ill wind, said a boatman, who catch'd it, which blows nobody any good.

The sentry, being a Gascon, incontinently twirl'd up his whiskers, and level'd his arquebuse.

Arquebuses in those days went off with matches; and an old woman's paper lantern at the end of the bridge happening to be blown out, she had borrow'd the sentry's match to light it ;-it gave a moment's time for the Gascon's blood to run cool, and turn the accident better to his advantage.-'Tis an ill wind, said he, catching off the Notary's castor, and legitimating the capture with the boatman's adage.

The poor Notary cross'd the bridge, and passing along the Rue de Dauphine into the Fauxbourg of St. Germain, lamented himself as he walked along in this manner :

Luckless man that I am! said the Notary, to be the sport of hurricanes all my days !-to be born to have the storm of ill language level'd against me and my profession wherever I go!-to be forced into marriage by the thunder of the church to a tempest of a woman!-to be driven forth out of my house by domestic winds, and despoil'd of my castor by pontific ones!-to be here, bare-headed, in a windy night, at the mercy of the ebbs and flows of accidents! Where am I to lay my head?-Miserable man! what wind in the two-and-thirty points of the whole compass can blow unto thee, as it does to the rest of thy fellow-creatures, good!

As the Notary was passing on by a dark passage, complaining in this sort, a voice called out to a girl, to bid her run for the next Notary.-Now the Notary being the next, and availing himself of his situation, walk'd up the passage to the door, and passing through an old sort of a saloon, was usher'd into a large chamber, dismantled of every thing but a long military pike,-a breast-plate,-a rusty old sword, and bandoleer, hung up equidistant in four different places against the wall.

An old personage, who had heretofore been a gentleman, and unless decay of fortune taints the