banker. To her mind, the revolution of 1830
conveyed but a very dim and meagre impression.
Once, when Mademoiselle Espremenil, who
was an Orleanist, told her that three hundred
patriots were killed on the Place du Carrousel,
fighting against the Swiss guard, she
exclaimed, " How very wicked of them to fight
against the king's soldiers!" and was called
nigaude, and made to copy out the third chapter
of Télémaque, for her pains. She had
never gone outside the doors of the Pension
Marcassin at the time of the celebration of the
fêtes, during the whole of her incarceration in
that penitentiary. The other girls had given
her, from time to time, glowing accounts of
what they had seen during the three glorious
days; but to Lily those were only fairy tales
and fables, as beautiful but as unreal as any in
the Arabian Nights.

Now, she was privileged—by her own act and
deed at least—to see the grand sight, for a
momentary peep at which, even, she had often
thirsted, and to wander at will among the merry-
makers. But she fled from it all as though it
had been a pestilence. She was afraid. While
the day lasted, she thought, it would be folly,
it would be madness, to venture into the Elysian
Fields, where all the world of Paris would be
out walking. No, no: that place was to be
avoided at all hazards. Still she had an
irresistible craving to see something of the brave
show, before she commenced her flight to
England in good earnest. She would wait until
sunset, she thought—until nearly dusk. Then
the crowd would be denser, and the quieter sort
of folks gone home, and she might mingle with
the throng unnoticed and unrecognised.

Now lagging, now hurrying through a tortuous
maze of streets, she came all at once into the
great garish Rue de Rivoli, and saw the
Tuileries Gardens and the Place de la Concorde
one vast Lake of Pleasure, covered with Islands
of Delight, blazing in the sun. She turned
from the dangerous open, and fled. Ascending
the Rue St. Honoré she ventured to cross it
before she reached the Palais Royal, and even
got safe over the upper part of the Rue de
Rivoli into the dismal little labyrinth of
bylanes, full of sellers of old prints, and older
curiosities, technically known as the Pâté du
Louvre, and which had grown up, a fungus,
between the palaces of the Louvre and the
Tuileries. To her relief she managed to gain
the Quai: not that where the old gold-dealers
live, but that which fronts the Long Gallery. She
crossed the Pont Royal as timorously as a little
mouse seeking a fresh hole, and, diving down
the Rue du Bac, was glad to lose herself in a
fresh labyrinth of little streets.

She found out, perhaps, the dimmest little
cabinet de lecture, or reading-room, that ever
was groped for, and at last discovered, in the
dimmest portion of old Paris. It seemed, to
Lily, not much bigger in size than the cage of a
good-sized macaw, and was very dark and
gloomy, and so suited her admirably. The old
maiden lady who kept this abode of literature
had read herself more than three parts blind
with bad novels, and was so deeply immersed
in one of the admired works of Monsieur
Horace St. Aubin, that, when Lily entered, she
could barely find time to extend her hand for
five sous—the regulation price of admission, to
the Cabinet of the Muses.

All the people who frequented the reading-
room were old—as old as the visitors whom
Madame de Kergolay received, but of a shabbier
and more dilapidated type. They seemed to be
tumbling to pieces with sheer antiquity, both in
their bodies and their garments, and to be only
kept together by means of stays, and braces,
and pins, and buttons, and hooks, the horns
of spectacles, the springs of false teeth, and the
elastic bands of wigs. There never was such a
rickety congregation. Ague, paralysis,
neuralgia, and sciatica, seemed to have gotten hold
of the furniture as well as the patrons of the
establishment; and everything tottered and
shook, and trembled and creaked. As Lily
walked up the room, and chose the darkest
corner, the very boards yielded beneath her
tread, and sent up little clouds of dust, giving
to her ankles a wreathed appearance, as though
she had been a young Mercury.

There was a tall old gentleman who came to
the Cabinet, not to read, but to sleep. It could
not be said precisely that he snored, but the air
about him seemed to be haunted by the spirit
of a defunct trombone. And it was a spirit
seemingly in pain.

There was a little old lady who represented a
prodigious cap, a large pair of green goggles,
a red plaid shawl, and nothing else. Her face
seemed to have gone out of town, and to have
left a P.P.C. card over the spectacles, on which
some one had sketched the lineaments of a
death's head; but sketched them very faintly.
And most of the time even this was a fact
which you were not enabled to ascertain with
any degree of certainty, as the little old lady
usually kept a copy of the Gazette de France
before her, never turning over the pages; and
under those circumstances she was only so much
newspaper, and so much shawl.

Over against Lily there sat an ancient
personage of the male sex, lean and long as Don
Quixote, and wearing a nightcap under his hat.
He had a long green cloak with a rabbit's skin
collar; and under this cloak he fondled and
cherished a diminutive dog of, apparently, the
turnspit breed. There was a very strict
prohibition against the introduction of dogs to the
Cabinet, in a notice hung up at the entrance.
But the old gentleman had very probably been
offending against the regulations for the last
fifty years. He was the senior, the doyen of
the customers. Those who surrounded him
were too old and feeble to resent his malfeasance,
and the lady at the counter was too much
engrossed by Monsieur Horace St. Aubin to
take notice of anything outside her book.
Still, the old man in the cloak was not
exempt from occasional twinges of conscience.
The little dog was generally very quiet, but,