t; nor was
I willing to descend among the vermin of the common chain-gang. Shame
prevented an application to my relatives in France or Italy; and when
I addressed my old partner or former friends in Cuba, I was not even
favored with a reply. At last, my little trinkets and gold chronometer
were sacrificed to pay the lawyer for a _final memorial_ and to
liquidate a week's lodging in advance.

"Now, _mon enfant_," said Madame Sorret, as she took my
money,--trimming her cap, and looking at me with that thrifty interest
that a Frenchwoman always knows how to turn to the best
account;--"now, mon enfant,--this is your last _franc_ and your last
week in my apartment, you say;--your last week in a room where you and
I, and Babette, Dolorescita, and Concha, and _Monsieur_, have had such
good times! _Mais pourquoi, mon cher?_ why shall it be your last week?
Come let us think a bit. Won't it be a thousand times better; won't it
do you a vast deal more good,--if instead of _sacre-ing le bon Louis
Philippe_,--paying lawyers for memorials that are never read,--hoping
for letters from the Spanish envoy which never come, and eating your
heart up in spite and bitterness--you look the matter plump in the
face like a man, and not like a _polisson_, and turn to account those
talents which it has pleased _le bon Dieu_ to give you? Voyez vous,
_Capitaine Teodore_,--you speak foreign languages like a native; and
it was no longer than yesterday that Monsieur Randanne, your advocate,
as he came down from the last interview with you, stopped at my
bureau, and--'Ah! Madame Sorret,' said he, 'what a linguist poor Canot
is,--how delightfully he speaks English, and how glad I should be if
he had any place in which he could teach my sons the noble tongue of
the great SKATSPEER!'

"Now, _mon capitaine_," continued she, "what the good Randanne said,
has been growing in my mind ever since, like the salad seed in the box
that is sunned in our prison yard. In fact, I have fixed the matter
perfectly. You shall have my bed-room for a schoolhouse; and, if you
will, you may begin to-morrow with my two sons for pupils, at fifteen
_francs_ a month!"

Did I not bless the wit and heart of woman again and again in my joy
of industrial deliverance! The heart of woman--that noble heart! burn
it in the fire of Africa; steep it in the snow of Sweden; lap it in
the listless elysium of Indian tropics; cage it in the centre of
dungeons, as the palpitating core of tha