udoir_ at the farther end of the
apartment, stretched on a sofa--writhing, groaning, and gnashing his
teeth: I thought of Richard in the tent scene. I once heard him
say--(I must give part of his expression in his own words, for
terrible as they are, they are, at the same time, so simple, that they
would lose their force in translation)--"_J'ai la bras fatal!_ if I
fire at a mark ten to one I miss it: I never miss a man." His look and
tone, as he uttered this, were as of one who should speak of an
attendant demon, from whose dominion he had no power of escape.

_R_.--I once was witness to an instance of apathy on the part of a
father--your talking of duelling reminds me of it--which is perhaps
without a parallel. Walking one day beyond the _Barriere de Clichy_, I
saw several persons assembled at a little distance from the roadside.
Two gentlemen had just taken their ground--you know that these affairs
are not always conducted with the same privacy on the Continent as in
England--and received their pistols from the hands of their seconds.
They fired at the same instant. One of the combatants, a line young
man of about five-and-twenty, received his adversary's shot in his
forehead: it pierced his brain. He sprang nearly his own height from
the ground, and fell dead. He was immediately carried home to his
father's house, which was at no great distance from the spot, and I
went along with the crowd. He was an only son, mind you, but (so it
was said) a _mauvais sujet_ of the last degree--indeed the very
quarrel which led to the duel had occurred in a gaming-house of which
he was a regular frequenter. The body, which I followed into the
courtyard of his father's house, was placed on the stones. The father
was sent for;--a _scene_ was naturally to be expected;--and a
scene to be remembered there was. The old gentleman came out, looked
calmly upon the dead body of his son, deliberately took a pinch of
snuff, tapped down the lid of the box, and, saying nothing in the
world more than--_Enfin!_--walked in again.

_S.--Pere Sensible!_

_Ibid._

* * * * *

POLITICAL CHANGES.

Presumptuous was the wish so patriotically conceived, and so
repeatedly extolled, of that pious churchman, who exclaimed, with
reference to the constitution of his native country, now no more
existing as an independent state, "Esto perpetua!" The ancients,
indeed, to secure what might be humanely termed a perpetuity to