ervals, the sight of an English newspaper. Nine or ten months
frequently elapsed without their receiving any intelligence from
England. When they had the good fortune to procure one, the precautions
necessary to be adopted were hardly to be believed. The same gentleman
informed me, that upon receiving an English paper, he did not venture to
mention the circumstance even to his wife and children, lest, in their
joy, some incautious words might have escaped from them before the
servants of the family, in which case, detection would have been
immediate, and imprisonment inevitable. Keeping it, therefore, entirely
to himself, he concealed it from every eye during the day, and at night,
after the family had gone to bed, he sat up, lighted his taper, and,
when every thing was still and silent about him, ventured, only then, to
read over the paper, and to get by heart the most important parts of the
intelligence regarding England; and he afterwards transmitted the
invaluable present to some secret friend, who, in the same manner, dared
only to peruse it at midnight, and with the same precautions.

A very sensible distinction has been made in the French code, in the
difference of punishment which is inflicted upon robbery, when it has or
has not been accompanied by murder; and the consequence of such
distinction is, that in that country the most determined robberies are
seldom, as they often are with us, accompanied with murder; whilst the
accurate proportionment of punishment to the crimes, encourages persons
possessing information to come forward, and removes those natural
scruples which all must feel, when they reflect that they may be the
chief instruments in bringing down a capital penalty upon the head of an
individual, whose trivial offence was in no respect deserving of this
last and severest punishment of the law.

The crime of which I heard most frequently, and of which the common
occurrence may be traced to the miserable condition to which trade and
commerce were, during the last few years, reduced in France, and to that
general laxity of moral conduct which even now distinguishes that
country, was _Fraudulent Bankruptcy_. The merchant, no longer possessing
the means of making his fortune by fair speculation, has recourse to
this nefarious mode of bettering his condition. He settles with his
creditors for a small per centage; disposes of his property by
fictitious sales, _ventes simulees_, and thus enriches himself u