mouth, one more smack of the lips, before the devil got the soul,
and the body was left to birds and vermin. He would like to use all
his tallow before the light was blown out and the lantern broken.

While these thoughts were passing through his mind, he was feeling,
half mechanically, for his purse. Suddenly his heart stopt beating; a
feeling of cold scales passed up the back of his legs, and a cold blow
seemed to fall upon his scalp. He stood petrified for a moment; then
he felt again with one feverish movement; and then his loss burst upon
him, and he was covered at once with perspiration. To spendthrifts
money is so living and actual--it is such a thin veil between them and
their pleasures! There is only one limit to their fortune--that of
time; and a spendthrift with only a few crowns is the Emperor of Rome
until they are spent. For such a person to lose his money is to suffer
the most shocking reverse, and fall from heaven to hell, from all to
nothing, in a breath. And all the more if he has put his head in the
halter for it; if he may be hanged to-morrow for that same purse, so
dearly earned, so foolishly departed! Villon stood and curst; he threw
the two whites into the street; he shook his fist at heaven; he
stamped, and was not horrified to find himself trampling the poor
corpse. Then he began rapidly to retrace his steps toward the house
beside the cemetery. He had forgotten all fear of the patrol, which
was long gone by at any rate, and had no idea but that of his lost
purse. It was in vain that he looked right and left upon the snow:
nothing was to be seen. He had not dropt it in the streets. Had it
fallen in the house? He would have liked dearly to go in and see; but
the idea of the grizzly occupant unmanned him. And he saw besides, as
he drew near, that their efforts to put out the fire had been
unsuccessful; on the contrary, it had broken into a blaze, and a
changeful light played in the chinks of door and window, and revived
his terror for the authorities and Paris gibbet.

II

THE LANTERN BEARERS[65]

These boys congregated every autumn about a certain easterly
fisher-village, where they tasted in a high degree the glory of
existence. The place was created seemingly on purpose for the
diversion of young gentlemen. A street or two of houses, mostly red
and many of them tiled; a number of fine trees clustered about the
manse and the kirkyard, and turning the chief street into a shady
alley;