rthenware, corks used over and over
again indefinitely, soiled table-linen, odds and ends that could descend
but one step lower into the dust-heap, and all the squalid necessities
of a pinched household in Paris?

In these days, when the five-franc piece is always lurking in our
thoughts and intruding itself into our speech, Dr. Poulain, aged
thirty-three, was still a bachelor. Heaven had bestowed on him a mother
with no connections. In ten years he had not met with the faintest
pretext for a romance in his professional career; his practice lay among
clerks and small manufacturers, people in his own sphere of life, with
homes very much like his own. His richer patients were butchers, bakers,
and the more substantial tradespeople of the neighborhood. These, for
the most part, attributed their recovery to Nature, as an excuse for
paying for the services of a medical man, who came on foot, at the rate
of two francs per visit. In his profession, a carriage is more necessary
than medical skill.

A humdrum monotonous life tells in the end upon the most adventurous
spirit. A man fashions himself to his lot, he accepts a commonplace
existence; and Dr. Poulain, after ten years of his practice, continued
his labors of Sisyphus without the despair that made early days so
bitter. And yet--like every soul in Paris--he cherished a dream.
Remonencq was happy in his dream; La Cibot had a dream of her own; and
Dr. Poulain, too, dreamed. Some day he would be called in to attend
a rich and influential patient, would effect a positive cure, and the
patient would procure a post for him; he would be head surgeon to a
hospital, medical officer of a prison or police-court, or doctor to the
boulevard theatres. He had come by his present appointment as doctor
to the Mairie in this very way. La Cibot had called him in when the
landlord of the house in the Rue de Normandie fell ill; he had treated
the case with complete success; M. Pillerault, the patient, took
an interest in the young doctor, called to thank him, and saw his
carefully-hidden poverty. Count Popinot, the cabinet minister, had
married M. Pillerault's grand-niece, and greatly respected her uncle; of
him, therefore, M. Pillerault had asked for the post, which Poulain had
now held for two years. That appointment and its meagre salary came just
in time to prevent a desperate step; Poulain was thinking of emigration;
and for a Frenchman, it is a kind of death to leave France.

Dr. Pou