end, and then I shall be happy to enlist with
you for life, expecting to find it a much more
agreeable partnership than with Brown Bess!"

The letters of the ladies are even more
comic than those of the gentlemen. For
instance, we have a specimen letter from
a young lady, in which she says "neither yes
nor no;" and in a note, Monsieur Paul Persan,
the editor, informs us that a refusal should
be made verbally or by a third person,
because a young lady always compromises
herself by taking notice of a letter, which,
from its motive, is generally handed to her
secretly. After this we are not surprised at
a letter in which the lady declines, with
excellent arguments, a rendezvous, and yet
names the place where she may be met
alone. And, to crown the series, we have
one under the untranslateable title of lettre
de coquetterie. And the series, running
through a crowd of varieties, is closed by a specimen
of a letter for a marriage de convenance,
and in which the gentleman, without any fine
phrases, rests his claims on his fortune.

In another chapter we have instructions
and specimen models of petitions to the
Emperor,— From a father or mother to ask
pardon for a son— from a wife asking pardon
for a husband— a petition to the Emperor for
pecuniary relief— a petition to the Emperor
to be restored to a place— a petition to ask,
after long services, the legion of honour.

We get a hint of the difficulties which a
small manufacturer finds in growing into a
great one, in models of petitions which must
be addressed to the Minister of the Interior
and the Prefect of the Department; beside
notices in all the parishes are indispensable
before a factory or a forge can be erected
anywhere. We doubt whether our
Arkwrights, our Bramahs, our Whitworths, our
Shutts, our Crosskills and Mintons, and a
crowd of thriving English manufacturers,
could ever have begun at the beginning, and
raised small works to their present size, if
they had to petition through the county
magistrates and lord-lieutenants, the Home
Office and the attorney-general. In France
we venture to hint that half the Socialism
arises from the monopolies and forms that
stop up, in legal cul-de-sacs, all private
enterprise that is backed by nothing more
potent than talent and a little saved money.

The forms for marrying, burying, and registering
birth, occupy a considerable space. The
rules of marriage seem expressly devised to find
occupation for the Barnacle family. We know
nothing like it in England, except the rules of
the Emigration Commissioners, under which
a man twenty-five years of age was delayed a
month to obtain his certificate of baptism.

A man cannot marry in France before
eighteen, nor a woman before fifteen. The
consent of parents is required at all ages, up
to seventy even; and a man under twenty-five
and a woman under twenty-one can in
nowise be married without such consent.
After twenty-five and up to thirty for men,
and from twenty-one to twenty-five for
women, respectful summonses must be given
three times for three months; after thirty,
one summons is enough, but in any case they
must be made by a notary. If the parents are
not present at the marriage, their consent
must be presented, also drawn up by a notary.
The parties to be married must produce
certificates of their birth; and if the parents of
either are dead, certificates of their burial.

In a word, courtship and marriage in
France is surrounded by so many forms,
that it may be doubted whether the original
legislators did not consider it a sort of crime.
And it may be also doubted whether the
difficulties with which it is surrounded, have
not had their expressive  consequences.

It will be seen from the preceding sketch
of Monsieur Paul Persan's Secrétaire
Universel, that there are manners and customs
of the French not discovered by ordinary
travellers; indeed, it is highly probable, riot
yet discovered by themselves.

            MY GHOSTS.

"I DO not believe in ghosts, because I have
never seen one," said somebody to a philosopher,
who replied, "And I do not believe
in ghosts, because I have seen too many of
them." As for myself, I believe in ghosts.
I believe in ghosts, because I am constantly
seeing and continually making them. If you
will not tell anybody, I may confide my
secret to you (a secret which, perchance, you
may find one day worth more than all the
nuggets of Australia), and tell you how I
became a ghost-seer and a ghost-maker.

I am a haunted man, descended from
haunted mothers. Physiology may say what
it pleases, but the nurses are the mothers of
the boys, far more truly than the boys are the
fathers of the men. When I was a heavy
lump of an infant, I had once a nursing-mother
who climbed up with me in her arms
upon the scaffold of a house in course of
construction. Of course, as I was a heavy lump,
she set me down on the scaffold to rest
herself after the fatigue I had occasioned her
by my weight. Very naturally, too, as he
was interesting to her and I was not, she
gave to the young stonemason who had asked
her up, her undivided attention. Inevitably,
also, by the truly infantile law of gravitation
towards mischief, I toppled over and
fell from the level of a first-floor down upon
granite stones. This innocent young damsel
was, I suspect, the mother of at least half a
score of broken bones in my body.
Moreover, I may genealogically trace to her
the peculiarities inseparable from a nervous
system, some of the cases of which have
been fractured and several of its cords
crushed and torn. The whole affair is
explained satisfactorily by the nursery aphorism,
"Brats are never out of mischief."