-pray how do you know
my name?"

"How should I not know it? I have looked into the meetings of the 'Clubs
rouges.' I have heard you speak, and naturally asked your name. Bon soir
M. Monnier! When you reflect in cooler moments, you will see that if
patriots excuse Brutus for first dishonouring and then executing his own
son, an officer charged to defend his country may be surely pardoned for
slaying a runaway to whom he was no relation, when in slaying he saved
the man's name and kindred from dishonour--unless, indeed, you insist on
telling the world why he was slain."

"I know your voice--I know it. Every sound becomes clearer to my ear.
And if--"

But while Monnier thus spoke, De Mauleon had hastened on. Monnier looked
round, saw him gone, but did not pursue. He was just intoxicated enough
to know that his footsteps were not steady, and he turned back to the
wine-shop and asked surlily for more wine. Could you have seen him then
as he leant swinging himself to and fro against the wall,--had you known
the man two years ago, you would have been a brute if you felt disgust.
You could only have felt that profound compassion with which we gaze on
a great royalty fallen. For the grandest of all royalties is that which
takes its crown from Nature, needing no accident of birth. And Nature
made the mind of Armand Monnier king-like; endowed it with lofty scorn
of meanness and falsehood and dishonour, with warmth and tenderness of
heart which had glow enough to spare from ties of kindred and hearth and
home, to extend to those distant circles of humanity over which royal
natures would fain extend the shadow of their sceptre.

How had the royalty of the man's nature fallen thus? Royalty rarely
falls from its own constitutional faults. It falls when, ceasing to be
royal, it becomes subservient to bad advisers. And what bad advisers,
always appealing to his better qualities and so enlisting his worser,
had discrowned this mechanic?

"A little knowledge is a dangerous thing," says the old-fashioned poet.

"Not so," says the modern philosopher; "a little knowledge; is safer
than no knowledge." Possibly, as all individuals and all communities
must go through the stage of a little knowledge before they can arrive
at that of much knowledge, the philosopher's assertion may be right
in the long-run, and applied to humankind in general. But there is
a period, as there is a class, in which a little knowledge tends to
terrible demorali