did not mean to go out sooner than he
could help. I asked him if he were not in pain, and he said "Yes," when
he "thought about it."

Poor little chap! he only managed to live like a "fighting-cock" for
three days more. Then he died, cheerful up to the last, so they told me,
like the plucky little English game-cock he was. He could not have been
more than twelve years old when he crowed his last. It had been a short
life for him, but a very merry one.

Now, if only this little beggar and poor old Ludwig could have gone into
partnership, and so have shared between them the shoeblack's power of
enjoying and the king's stock of enjoyments, what a good thing it would
have been for both of them--especially for King Ludwig. He would never
have thought of drowning himself then--life would have been too
delightful.

But that would not have suited Fate. She loves to laugh at men, and to
make of life a paradox. To the one, she played ravishing strains, having
first taken the precaution to make him stone-deaf. To the other, she
piped a few poor notes on a cracked tin-whistle, and he thought it was
music, and danced!

A few years later on, at the very same spot where King Ludwig threw back
to the gods their gift of life, a pair of somewhat foolish young lovers
ended their disappointments, and, finding they could not be wedded
together in life, wedded themselves together in death. The story, duly
reported in the newspapers as an item of foreign intelligence, read more
like some old Rhine-legend than the record of a real occurrence in this
prosaic nineteenth century.

He was a German Count, if I remember rightly, and, like most German
Counts, had not much money; and her father, as fathers will when proposed
to by impecunious would-be sons-in-law, refused his consent. The Count
then went abroad to try and make, or at all events improve, his fortune.
He went to America, and there he prospered. In a year or two he came
back, tolerably rich--to find, however, that he was too late. His lady,
persuaded of his death, had been urged into a marriage with a rich
somebody else. In ordinary life, of course, the man would have contented
himself with continuing to make love to the lady, leaving the rich
somebody else to pay for her keep. This young couple, however, a little
lighter headed, or a little deeper hearted than the most of us, whichever
it may have been, and angry at the mocking laughter with which the air
around them