"She kissed the boy, and said, caressing him,
It is for thine own dear sake. Thou wilt be
faithful, little Charles?' The child answered
her bravely, 'Yes!' I kissed her hand, and she
took him in her arms, and went away caressing
him. I never saw her more.

"As she had mentioned her husband's name
in the faith that I knew it, I added no mention
of it to my letter. I sealed my letter, and, not
trusting it out of my own hands, delivered it
myself that day.

"That night, the last night of the year,
towards nine o'clock, a man in a black dress rang
at my gate, demanded to see me, and softly
followed my servant, Ernest Defarge, a youth,
upstairs. When my servant came into the room
where I sat with my wife—O my wife, beloved
of my heart! My fair young English wife!—we
saw the man, who was supposed to be at the
gate, standing silent behind him.

"An urgent case in the Rue St. Honoré,
he said. It would not detain me, he had a
coach in waiting.

"It brought me here, it brought me to my
grave. When I was clear of the house, a black
muffler was drawn tightly over my mouth from
behind, and my arms were pinioned. The two
brothers crossed the road from a dark corner,
and identified me with a single gesture. The
Marquis took from his pocket the letter I had
written, showed it me, burnt it in the light of
a lantern that was held, and extinguished the
ashes with his foot. Not a word was spoken.
I was brought here, I was brought to my living
grave.

"If it had pleased GOD to put it in the hard
heart of either of the brothers, in all these
frightful years, to grant me any tidings of my
dearest wife—so much as to let me know by a
word whether alive or dead—I might have
thought that He had not quite abandoned them.
But, now I believe that the mark of the red
cross is fatal to them, and that they have no
part in His mercies. And them and their
descendants, to the last of their race, I Alexandre
Manette, unhappy prisoner, do this last night
of the year 1767, in my unbearable agony,
denounce to the times when all these things shall
be answered for. I denounce them to Heaven
and to earth."

A terrible sound arose when the reading of
this document was done. A sound of craving
and eagerness that had nothing articulate in it
but blood. The narrative called up the most
revengeful passions of the time, and there was
not a head in the nation but must have dropped
before it.

Little need, in presence of that tribunal and
that auditory, to show how the Defarges had
not made the paper public, with the other
captured Bastille memorials borne in procession,
and had kept it, biding their time. Little need
to show that this detested family name had long
been anathematised by Saint Antoine, and was
wrought into the fatal register. The man
never trod ground, whose virtues and services
would have sustained him in that place that
day, against such denunciation.

And all the worse for the doomed man, that
the denouncer was a well-known citizen, his
own attached friend, the father of his wife. One
of the frenzied aspirations of the populace was,
for imitations of the questionable public virtues
of antiquity, and for sacrifices and self-immolations
on the people's altar. Therefore, when
the President said (else had his own head
quivered on his shoulders), that the good physician
of the Republic would deserve better still
of the Republic by rooting out an obnoxious
family of Aristocrats, and would doubtless feel a
sacred glow and joy in making his daughter a
widow and her child an orphan, there was wild
excitement, patriotic fervour, not a touch of
human sympathy.

"Much influence around him, has that doctor?"
murmured Madame Defarge, smiling to
The Vengeance. "Save him now, my doctor,
save him!"

At every juryman's vote, there was a roar.
Another and another. Roar and roar.

Unanimously voted. At heart and by descent
an Aristocrat, an enemy of the Republic, a
notorious oppressor of the People. Back to the
Conciergerie, and Death within four-and-twenty
hours!

SMALL SHOT.

COOKS AT COLLEGE.

I AM dying from irritability produced by eating
raw mutton-chops, and from indigestion
produced by potato-bullets. My murderer is
Betsy Jane, our cook. On my Kensal-green
tombstone will be inscribed the words: "Died
from the effects of a very plain cook."

We English, learned men assure me, are mere
barbarians and Hotandhots in our cooking,
compared with the French and other continental
nations. We have freedom, but then we have
indigestion, just as the Americans have a republic
and universal dyspepsia. Perhaps philosophers
and theorists may prove some day that a strong
government and a weak stomach always go
together. It may be that this compensation
is ordained that tyranny may have its
consolation in a fine constitution; and freedom, apt
to be noisy in its self-complacency, have its
corrective in a squeamy appetite.

But this by the way. What I have to
complain of is, that I, as a plain man of moderate
appetite and limited ideas of dining, can get
nothing eatable from my plain cook, Betsy Jane.
If I ask for a chop, it comes out as if just cut
from the flank of a live ox, in the Abyssinian
manner; or if she is in a slow mood, and at the
other end of her mental gamut, it comes out a
black fossil, frizzled and scorched, with nothing
but the marrow soft or juicy about it. My
soup is watered gravy, my tripe has the
flavour of boiled kid gloves, my bread is
leaden, my harico is greasy, my French
beans are so hard and spiky that you could
use them as pins, my eggs are water or
congealed to a sulphurous paste. In fact, in the