old French lady with snow-white ringlets,
tight, long and cylindrical, like frozen
sausages. There was the imbecile grandfather,
with a black silk skull-cap on his
poor old pate, and his shrunken limbs wrapped
in a grey duffell dressing-gown; an old
man past everything except forbearance—
weak, helpless, useless—a baby come back
to the primeval baldness, but uncommonly
good at his meals—loved and tended, and
cared for, however, as though he had been
grandfather Weguelin, and could ask his
grandchildren to tea in the bank parlour of
the Bank of England every evening, and hand
round to them boiled bullion, and sycee silver
sally-lunns. The picture would not be even
artistically complete without a jeune
personne—a blushing young maiden of sixteen —
swathed up to the chin in white muslin, who
is told that she must always keep her eyes cast
down; who will be married, shortly, to somebody
she does not like; and who will eventually
run away, or otherwise misbehave herself,
with somebody she does like. The middle
distance would be wanting to the picture were I
to omit a peculiarly sharp boy in a black velvet
jacket and sugar-loaf buttons, and a pair of
cream-coloured trowsers, much resembling—
as regards their degree of inflation—
balloons. A youth who is continually (and I am
afraid with detriment to the progress of his
studies), practising inquiries into the laws
of gravitation, with a cup and ball, and who
assuredly must do a considerable amount of
damage to his father's stock of pomatum, if
we are to take into consideration the prodigious
accumulation of fatty substances patent
on his hair. There would be something out of
keeping, too, were the painter to omit the
inevitable accessory to all French families at
home or abroad, from Caen to Kamschatka,
in the shape of an aunt, a cousin, a niece,
a dependent of some sort, in fact --
ordinarily a subdued female with a bulbous nose,
and clad in very scanty, snuffy habiliments,
who sits and works, and tends children, and
is the friend of the family; and whose only
amusement, when she is left quite alone,
seems to be to sit and cry her eyes out, with
the assistance of a very sparse square of
pocket-handkerchief. Her name is usually
Mademoiselle Hortense. Last of all, there
must perforce be put on the canvas a
minute point of detail answering to the
name of a poodle or a mongrel, as the case
may be -- a dog who does exactly as he likes,
is addressed by affectionate nicknames by
the simple French folk, and is generally
made much of.

NOT last of all, at least in the barber's
household. There was the old lady, the
jeune personne, the velvet and sugar-loafed
boy, the dubious aunt or niece, the dog; and
there was Somebody,

A perfectly white, haggard, worn-out,
spectral girl. A girl robbed from her coffin.
An awful sight, with restless, travelling eyes,
with a horrible head rocking backwards and
forwards, with hands continually clasping
and unclasping, with knees that (you could
see beneath her drapery) continually sought
each other, and then gave time to her feet,
which beat the devil's tattoo incessantly.
She had rich glossy hair, massed on each side
of her head; her eyes were dark and lustrous;
her teeth were gates of ivory; her form was
slender and graceful; yet, had she been as
hideous as the witch Sycorax, as terrible as
Medusa, she could not, with all her beauty,
have impressed you with a greater sense of
horror and back-shrinking. The girl was
mad, of course. She was quite harmless,
only rocking herself backwards and forwards,
and rolling those wild eyes of hers, and
(when she was unobserved) muttering something
about her mother. She used to dine
with us, and ply her knife and fork, and
drink her weak wine and water with the best
of the sane people present; but, she always
relapsed into the rocking, and the rolling, and
the muttering about her mother, as we were
sitting down to dominoes or lasquenet.
Nobody took much notice of her. She sat by
the fire-place, with her haggard face, and a
tight-fitting black velvet dress; and, when
she was spoken of, was alluded to as Cette
pauvre Josephine.

That poor Josephine's story was a very simple
and a very sad one. She was the daughter
of a French dancing-master, long settled in
Russia, and a Russian subject. Her mother
had been some French ballet-dancer, who had
waltzed away from her obligations, and had
pirouetted into an utter abnegation of her
social ties. Such things happen. She was
Madame Somebody at Palermo, while her
husband was Monsieur Somebody-else at
Moscow. He had gained enough money by
his profession to send his daughter to France
for her education, whence she returned (to her
misfortune) young, beautiful, and
accomplished. Her father pleased himself with the
notion that his Josephine must indubitably
become the wife of some puissant seigneur;
but, unfortunately, in the midst of this dream
he died. He, it is to be remembered, had
been naturalised a Russian subject, and his
child was one after him.

The girl, left alone and unfriended in this
Gehenna of a country, fell. The dancing-
master had dissipated all his economies of
roubles, and she had no money. She went
to St. Petersburg, having no money, in a
calèche with eight horses (it was before the
railway time), with a government
Padaroshna,* and a courier riding twenty versts

* A padaroshna is an official permission to travel with
post-horses, without which you might draw your carriage
yourself, for no post-horses would you obtain. Government couriers have special padaroshnas, which entitle
them to take horses before any other traveller; and it is
by no means uncommon at a post-house in the interior
to see a serjeant of infantry, who happens to be a bearer
of despatches, quietly order the horses just harnessed to a
carriage containing a whole family, to be taken out, and
attached to his own telega or kibitka,