yed upon him:
others were not; but the poor little man's credulity was so great, that
it was impossible to undeceive him; and he went from house to house
bewailing his fate, and followed by the complaisant marshal's officer.

The news of his death he received with much more meekness than could
have been expected; but what he could not reconcile to himself was, the
idea of dissection afterwards. "What can they want with me?" cried the
poor wretch, in an unusual fit of candor. "I am very small and ugly;
it would be different if I were a tall fine-looking fellow." But he
was given to understand that beauty made very little difference to the
surgeons, who, on the contrary, would, on certain occasions, prefer a
deformed man to a handsome one; for science was much advanced by the
study of such monstrosities. With this reason Poinsinet was obliged to
be content; and so paid his rounds of visits, and repeated his dismal
adieux.

The officer of the provost-marshal, however amusing Poinsinet's woes
might have been, began, by this time, to grow very weary of them,
and gave him more than one opportunity to escape. He would stop at
shop-windows, loiter round corners, and look up in the sky, but all in
vain: Poinsinet would not escape, do what the other would. At length,
luckily, about dinner-time, the officer met one of Poinsinet's friends
and his own: and the three agreed to dine at a tavern, as they had
breakfasted; and here the officer, who vowed that he had been up
for five weeks incessantly, fell suddenly asleep, in the profoundest
fatigue; and Poinsinet was persuaded, after much hesitation on his part,
to take leave of him.

And now, this danger overcome, another was to be avoided. Beyond a doubt
the police were after him, and how was he to avoid them? He must be
disguised, of course; and one of his friends, a tall, gaunt lawyer's
clerk, agreed to provide him with habits.

So little Poinsinet dressed himself out in the clerk's dingy black suit,
of which the knee-breeches hung down to his heels, and the waist of the
coat reached to the calves of his legs; and, furthermore, he blacked his
eyebrows, and wore a huge black periwig, in which his friend vowed that
no one could recognize him. But the most painful incident, with regard
to the periwig, was, that Poinsinet, whose solitary beauty--if beauty
it might be called--was a head of copious, curling, yellow hair, was
compelled to snip off every one of his golden locks, and to