forced them to secure the daily bread of her poor husband. The house
was sold for nine thousand five hundred francs, of which one thousand
five hundred went for costs. The remaining eight thousand came to Madame
Lorain, who lived upon the income of them in a sort of almshouse at
Nantes, like that of Sainte-Perine in Paris, called Saint-Jacques, where
the two old people had bed and board for a humble payment.

As it was impossible to keep Pierrette, their ruined little
granddaughter, with them, the old Lorrains bethought themselves of her
uncle and aunt Rogron, in Provins, to whom they wrote. These Rogrons
were dead. The letter might, therefore, have easily been lost; but if
anything here below can take the place of Providence, it is the post.
Postal spirit, incomparably above public spirit, exceeds in brilliancy
of resource and invention the ablest romance-writers. When the post gets
hold of a letter, worth, to it, from three to ten sous, and does
not immediately know where to find the person to whom that letter is
addressed, it displays a financial anxiety only to be met with in very
pertinacious creditors. The post goes and comes and ferrets through all
the eighty-six departments. Difficulties only arouse the genius of the
clerks, who may really be called men-of-letters, and who set about
to search for that unknown human being with as much ardor as the
mathematicians of the Bureau give to longitudes. They literally ransack
the whole kingdom. At the first ray of hope all the post-offices in
Paris are alert. Sometimes the receiver of a missing letter is amazed at
the network of scrawled directions which covers both back and front of
the missive,--glorious vouchers for the administrative persistency
with which the post has been at work. If a man undertook what the post
accomplishes, he would lose ten thousand francs in travel, time, and
money, to recover ten sous. The letter of the old Lorrains, addressed to
Monsieur Rogron of Provins (who had then been dead a year) was conveyed
by the post in due time to Monsieur Rogron, son of the deceased, a
mercer in the rue Saint-Denis in Paris. And this is where the postal
spirit obtains its greatest triumph. An heir is always more or less
anxious to know if he has picked up every scrap of his inheritance, if
he has not overlooked a credit, or a trunk of old clothes. The Treasury
knows that. A letter addressed to the late Rogron at Provins was certain
to pique the curiosity of Rogro