He made an offer of them to neither; but stood still with them at the corner of a hotel, for those to buy who chose it, without solicitation.

He was about forty-eight; of a sedate look, something approaching to gravity. I did not wonder. I went up rather to the basket than him, and having lifted up the napkin, and taken one of his pâtés into my hand, I begged he would explain the appearance which affected me.

He told me in a few words, that the best part of his life had passed in the service; in which, after spending a small patrimony, he had obtained a company and the croix with it; but that, at the conclusion of the last peace, his regiment being re-formed, and the whole corps, with those of some other regiments, left without any provision, he found himself in a wide world without friends, without a livre; and indeed, said he, without anything but this (pointing, as he said it, to his croix). The poor Chevalier won my pity; and he finished the scene by winning my esteem too. The king, he said,

was the most generous of princes; but his generosity could neither relieve nor reward every one; and it was only his misfortune to be amongst the number. He had

a little wife, he said,

whom he loved, who did the pâtisserie; and added, he felt no dishonor in defending her and himself from want in this way, unless Providence had offered him a better.

It would be wicked to withhold a pleasure from the good, in

passing over what happened to this poor Chevalier of St. Louis about nine months after.

It seems he usually took his stand near the iron gates which lead up to the palace; and as his croix had caught the eye of numbers, numbers had made the same inquiry which I had done. He had told the same story, and always with so much modesty and good sense, that it had reached at last the king's ears; who hearing the Chevalier had been a gallant officer, and respected by the whole regiment as a man of honor and integrity, he broke up his little trade by a pension of fifteen hundred livres a year.

As I have told this to please the reader, I beg he will allow me to relate another, out of its order, to please myself; the two stories reflect light upon each other, and 'tis a pity they should be parted.

WHEN states and empires have their periods of declension, and feel in their turns what distress and poverty is, I stop not to tell the causes which gradually brought the house of d'E- in Brittany into decay. The Marquis d'E had fought up against his condition with great firmness; wishing to preserve and still

show to the world some little fragments of what his ancestors had been their indiscretions had put it out of his power. There was enough left for the little exigencies of obscurity. But he