he piano, of that night's
conversazione.

[Illustration: THE CONVALESCENT.]

[Illustration: THE DIVIDED BURDEN.]

How hard it is for a life cast upon the crowded shores of the Old
World to regain the place once lost is shown by the history of my
honest friend Joliet. Born in 1812, of an excellent family living
twenty miles from Versailles, the little fellow lost his mother before
he could talk to her. When he was ten years old, his father, who had
failed after some land speculations, and had turned all he had into
money, tossed him up to the lintel of the doorway, kissed him, put a
twenty-franc gold-piece into his little pocket, and went away to
seek his fortune in Louisiana: the son never heard of him more. The
lady-president of a charitable society, Mademoiselle Marx, took pity
on the abandoned child: she fed him on bones and occasionally beat
him. She was an ingenious and inventive creature, and made her own
cat-o'-nine-tails: an inventor is for ever demonstrating the merits
of his implement. Soon, discovering that he was thankless and
unteachable, she made him enter, as youngest clerk, the law-office
of her admirer and attorney, Constabule. This gentleman, not finding
enough engrossing work to keep the lad out of mischief, allowed him to
sweep his rooms and blacken his boots. Little Joliet, after giving a
volatile air to a great many of his employer's briefs by making paper
chickens of them, showed his imperfect sense of the favors done him
by absconding. In fact, proud and independent, he was brooding over
boyish schemes of an honorable living and a hasty fortune. He soon
found that every profession required an apprenticeship, and that an
apprenticeship could only be bought for money. He was obliged, then,
to seek his grand fortune through somewhat obscure avenues. If I
were to follow my poor Joliet through all his transmigrations and
metempsychoses, as I have learned them by his hints, allusions and
confessions, I should show him by turns working a rope ferry, where
the stupid and indolent cattle, whose business it is to draw men, were
drawn by him; then letter-carrier; supernumerary and call-boy in a
village theatre; road-mender on a vicinal route; then a beadle,
a bell-ringer, and a sub-teacher in an infant school, where he
distributed his own ignorance impartially amongst his little patrons
at the end of a stick; after this, big drum in the New Year's
festivals, and ready at a moment's opportunity to throw