spending an inheritance."

"Eating and drinking an uncle, no doubt?" said Dumoulin, benevolently.

"Faith, I don't know."

"What! you don't know whom you are eating and drinking?"

"Why, you see, in the first place, my father was a bone-grubber."

"The devil he was!" said Dumoulin, somewhat out of countenance, though
in general not over-scrupulous in the choice of his bottle-companions:
but, after the first surprise, he resumed, with the most charming
amenity: "There are some rag-pickers very high by scent--I mean
descent!"

"To be sure! you may think to laugh at me," said Jacques, "but you are
right in this respect, for my father was a man of very great merit. He
spoke Greek and Latin like a scholar, and often told me that he had not
his equal in mathematics; besides, he had travelled a good deal."

"Well, then," resumed Dumoulin, whom surprise had partly sobered, "you
may belong to the family of the Counts of Rennepont, after all."

"In which case," said Rose-Pompon, laughing, "your father was not a
gutter-snipe by trade, but only for the honor of the thing."

"No, no--worse luck! it was to earn his living," replied Jacques; "but,
in his youth, he had been well off. By what appeared, or rather by
what did not appear, he had applied to some rich relation, and the
rich relation had said to him: 'Much obliged! try the work'us.' Then he
wished to make use of his Greek, and Latin, and mathematics. Impossible
to do anything--Paris, it seems, being choke-full of learned men--so
my father had to look for his bread at the end of a hooked stick, and
there, too, he must have found it, for I ate of it during two years,
when I came to live with him after the death of an aunt, with whom I had
been staying in the country."

"Your respectable father must have been a sort of philosopher," said
Dumoulin; "but, unless he found an inheritance in a dustbin, I don't see
how you came into your property."

"Wait for the end of the song. At twelve years of age I was an
apprentice at the factory of M. Tripeaud; two years afterwards, my
father died of an accident, leaving me the furniture of our garret--a
mattress, a chair, and a table--and, moreover, in an old Eau de Cologne
box, some papers (written, it seems, in English), and a bronze medal,
worth about ten sous, chain and all. He had never spoken to me of these
papers, so, not knowing if they were good for anything, I left them at
the bottom of an old trunk, instead of burning