gnetism, though they
are far more frequently lost in the vague spaces of the spiritual world.
It is rare to find a deformed person who is not gifted with some special
faculty,--a whimsical or sparkling gaiety perhaps, an utter malignity,
or an almost sublime goodness. Like instruments which the hand of art
can never fully waken, these beings, highly privileged though they know
it not, live within themselves, as Butscha lived, provided their natural
forces so magnificently concentrated have not been spent in the struggle
they have been forced to maintain, against tremendous odds, to keep
alive. This explains many superstitions, the popular legends of gnomes,
frightful dwarfs, deformed fairies,--all that race of bottles, as
Rabelais called them, containing elixirs and precious balms.

Butscha, therefore, had very nearly found the key to the puzzle. With
all the anxious solicitude of a hopeless lover, a vassal ever ready to
die,--like the soldiers alone and abandoned in the snows of Russia, who
still cried out, "Long live the Emperor,"--he meditated how to capture
Modeste's secret for his own private knowledge. So thinking, he followed
his patrons to the Chalet that evening, with a cloud of care upon his
brow: for he knew it was most important to hide from all these watchful
eyes and ears the net, whatever it might be, in which he should entrap
his lady. It would have to be, he thought, by some intercepted glance,
some sudden start or quiver, as when a surgeon lays his finger on a
hidden sore. That evening Gobenheim did not appear, and Butscha was
Dumay's partner against Monsieur and Madame Latournelle. During the few
moment's of Modeste's absence, about nine o'clock, to prepare for her
mother's bedtime, Madame Mignon and her friends spoke openly to one
another; but the poor clerk, depressed by the conviction of Modeste's
love, which had now seized upon him as upon the rest, seemed as remote
from the discussion as Gobenheim had been the night before.

"Well, what's the matter with you, Butscha?" cried Madame Latournelle;
"one would really think you hadn't a friend in the world."

Tears shone in the eyes of the poor fellow, who was the son of a Swedish
sailor, and whose mother was dead.

"I have no one in the world but you," he answered with a troubled voice;
"and your compassion is so much a part of your religion that I can never
lose it--and I will never deserve to lose it."

This answer struck the sensitive chord of