he stewing of some business in which his interests were mingled with
those of other men, to bring it fully out. Like all Parisians, Molineux
had the lust of dominating; he craved the share of sovereignty which is
exercised more or less by every one, even a porter, over a greater or
lesser number of victims,--over wife, children, tenants, clerks, horses,
dogs, monkeys, to whom they send, on the rebound, the mortifications
they have endured in the higher spheres to which they aspired.

This annoying old man had neither wife, child, nephew, or niece. He
bullied his servant-of-all-work too much to make her a victim; for she
escaped all contact with her master by doing her work and keeping out of
his way. His appetite for tyranny was thus balked; and to satisfy it
in some way he patiently studied the laws relating to rentals and
party-walls; he fathomed the jurisprudence which regulates the dwellings
of Paris in an infinite number of petty questions as to tenants,
abutters, liabilities, taxes, repairs, sweepings, decorations for the
Fete-Dieu, waste-pipes, lighting, projections over the public way, and
the neighborhood of unhealthy buildings. His means, his strength, in
fact his whole mind was spent in keeping his proprietary rights on a
complete war-footing. He had made it an amusement, and the amusement
had become a monomania. He was fond of protecting citizens against
the encroachment of illegal proceedings; but finding such subjects of
complaint rare, he had finally turned upon his own tenants. A tenant
became his enemy, his inferior, his subject, his vassal; he laid claim
to his subservience, and looked upon any man as a brute who passed
him on the stairway without speaking. He wrote out his bills for rent
himself, and sent them on the morning of the day they fell due. The
debtor who was behindhand in his payment received a legal notice to quit
at an appointed time. Then followed seizures, law-suits, costs, and
the whole judicial array set in motion with the rapidity of what the
head's-man calls the "mechanism." Molineux granted neither grace nor
time; his heart was a callus in the direction of a lease.

"I will lend you the money if you want it," he would say to a man he
thought solvent, "but pay my rent; all delays carry with them a loss of
interest for which the law does not indemnify us."

After long study of the caprices and capers of tenants who persisted,
after the fashion of dynasties, in upsetting the arrangem