e dancing-women, and their gowns all over spangles, and at
all the wit and grimaces, and somersets of harlequin and clown. They
have had a merry dinner and a dance, like a dance of elephants and
hippopotami; and then--

To-morrow to fresh fields and pastures new.

And these are the men that become sullen and desperate--that become
poachers and incendiaries. How and why! It is not plenty and kind words
that make them so? What, then? What makes the wolves herd together, and
descend from the Alps and the Pyrenees? What makes them desperate and
voracious, blind with fury, and reveling with vengeance? Hunger and
hardship!

When the English peasant is gay, at ease, well-fed and clothed, what
cares he how many pheasants are in a wood, or ricks in a farmer's yard?
When he has a dozen backs to clothe, and a dozen mouths to feed, and
nothing to put on the one, and little to put into the other--then that
which seemed a mere playful puppy, suddenly starts up a snarling,
red-eyed monster! How sullen he grows! With what equal indifference he
shoots down pheasants or game-keepers. How the man who so recently held
up his head and laughed aloud, now sneaks, a villainous fiend, with the
dark lantern and the match, to his neighbor's rick! Monster! Can this be
the English peasant? 'Tis the same!--'tis the very man! But what has
made him so? What has thus demonized, thus infuriated, thus converted
him into a walking pestilence? Villain as he is, is he alone to
blame?--or is there another?

[From the Dublin University Magazine.]

MAURICE TIERNAY, THE SOLDIER OF FORTUNE.

[_Continued from Page_ 340.]

CHAPTER IX.

A SCRAPE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.

When I reached the quarters of the etat major, I found the great
court-yard of the "hotel" crowded with soldiers of every rank and arm of
the service. Some were newly-joined recruits waiting for the orders to
be forwarded to their respective regiments. Some were invalids just
issued from the hospital, some were sick and wounded on their way
homeward. There were sergeants with billet rolls, and returns, and
court-martial sentences. Adjutants with regimental documents, hastening
hither and thither. Mounted orderlies, too, continually came and went;
all was bustle, movement, and confusion. Officers in staff uniforms
called out the orders from the different windows, and dispatches were
sent off here and there with hot haste. The building was the ancient
palace of the dukes of Lorra