wer, "Ball, sir!--cannon-ball, sir!--yes,
sir!" for all the world as though I had inquired about the mutton being in
good cut, or asparagus in season!

So, while they were shooting prisoners and dancing the Schottische at the
Casino; burying their dead; selling _breloques_ for watch-chains in the
Palais Royal; demolishing barricades, and staring at the caricatures in M.
Aubert's windows; taking the wounded to the hospitals, and stock-jobbing
on the Bourse; I went about my business, as well as the state of siege
would let me. Turning my face homeward, I took the Rouen and Havre
Railway, and so, _via_ Southampton, to London. As I saw the last cocked
hat of the last gendarme disappear with the receding pier at Havre, a
pleasant vision of the blue-coats, oil-skin hats, and lettered collars of
the land I was going to, swam before my eyes; and, I must say that,
descending the companion-ladder, I thanked Heaven I was an Englishman. I
was excessively sea-sick, but not the less thankful; and getting at last
to sleep, dreamed of the Bill of Rights and Habeas Corpus. I wonder how
_they_ would flourish amidst Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, and Musketry!

WHAT BECOMES OF THE RIND?

Of all the occupations that exercise the ordinary energies of human
beings, the most abstracting is that of sucking an orange. It seems to
employ the whole faculties for the time being. There is an earnestness of
purpose in the individual so employed--an impassioned determination to
accomplish what he has undertaken--that creates a kindred excitement in the
bystanders. His air is thoughtful; his eye severe, not to say relentless;
and although his mouth is full of inarticulate sounds, conversation is out
of the question. But the mind is busy although the tongue is silent; and
when the deed is accomplished, the collapsed spheroid seems to swell anew
with the ideas to which the exercise had given birth. One of these ideas
we shall catch and fix, for occurring as it did to ourselves, it is our
own property: it was contained in the question that rose suddenly in our
mind as we looked at the ruin we had made--What becomes of the rind?

And this is no light question; no unimportant or merely curious pastime
for a vacant moment. In our case it became more and more serious; it clung
and grappled, till it hung upon our meditations like the albatross round
the neck of the Ancient Mariner. Only consider what a subject it embraces.
The orange, it is true,