ece of lace as she passed down the streets, with the folds of her
dress almost sweeping the ground; while, with a scarf of beautiful
texture fastened round her waist, she resembled one of those maidens of
the sun which we see in Egyptian frescoes.

"Let me pass, Emmanuel," she said to a broken-backed, stunted broker,
who was hanging some filthy rags on a string which stretched across a
narrow lane.

"Pass! so you shall, my love, my own bright eyes: but you shall give me
a kiss first," said the cadaverous-looking wretch; and he put his thin,
bleared, and hairy lips near her face; but in the act he turned his head
half round, and, for the first time, he saw me.

"Oh, I ask your pardon, Rachel!" he said; "the Christian, of course,
before one of our own tribe. I know you well, my darling, you never
deceived me in your brightest days. You are a great lady; but, after
all, we are both more or less in the same line. I sell old clothes, you
sell old kisses; the difference is, that I cannot get rid of my wares as
fast as you can of your kisses."

Suddenly she turned round in all her beauty; flushed with indignation
and trembling with anger, contempt, bitterness, and hatred, could not
have been more gloriously expressed. The sallow, sickly, hollow-eyed
impertinent was looking up at her face when, with one push, she hurled
him over a heap of rubbish, which in the centre of the street supplied
the place of a gutter; and shouts of laughter saluted him as he slunk,
downcast and defeated, back into his shop.

When I looked at him, I observed that his eyes, which before had only
expressed lust and sordid avarice, now gleamed wildly with a look of
intense and bitter hatred.

There are none whom we are so disposed to punish as the mean and sordid,
and yet there are none whom it is more dangerous to offend; they feel,
with tenfold virulence, the disgust which they engender; they go about
bearing with them a curse, which they are ever ready to transfer to any
who offend them. No man is ignorant of his possessing the lower
qualities; and no one, not even he who suffers from their action, can so
intensely hate and despise them as their possessor. They are the chains
on the galley-slaves, which clank at every step, but which they cannot
shake off, allowing them only that amount of liberty of action which
incessantly recalls their restraint.

My guide turned sharp round to the left, and the next moment we were at
the foot of the broken