his example." With a marked emphasis on
the last few words, and with a cold bow, he left the room.

"That I am not led to follow his example!" said I, repeating his words
over slowly to myself. "Is that, then, the danger of which he would warn
me?"

The remembrance of the misfortunes which opened my career in life came
full before me,--the unhappy acquaintance with De Beauvais, and the long
train of suspicious circumstances that followed; and I shuddered at the
bare thought of being again involved in apparent criminality. And yet,
what a state of slavery was this! The thought flashed suddenly across my
mind, and I exclaimed aloud, "And this is the liberty for which I have
perilled life and limb,--this the cause for which I have become an alien
and an exile!"

"Most true, my dear friend," said Duchesne, gayly, as he slipped into
the room, and drew his Chair towards the fire. "A wise reflection, but
most unwisely spoken. But there are men nothing can teach; not even the
'Temple' nor the 'Palais de Justice.'"

"How, then,--you know of my unhappy imprisonment?"

"Know of it? To be sure I do. Bless your sweet innocence! I have been
told, a hundred times over, to make overtures to you from the Faubourg.
There are at least a dozen old ladies there who believe firmly you are a
true Legitimist, and wear the white cockade next your heart. I have had,
over and over, the most tempting offers to make you. Faith, I 'm
not quite certain if we are not believed to be, at this very moment,
concocting how to smuggle over the frontier a brass carronade and a
royal livery, two pounds of gunpowder and a court periwig, to restore
the Bourbons!"

He burst into a fit of laughing as he concluded; and however little
disposed to mirth at the moment, I could not refrain from joining in the
emotion.

"But now for a moment of serious consideration, Burke; for I can be
serious at times, at least when my friends are concerned. You and I must
part here; it is all the better for you it should be so. I am what the
world is pleased to call a 'dangerous companion;' and there's more truth
in the epithet than they wot of who employ it. It is not because I am a
man of pleasure, and occasionally a man of expensive habits and costly
tastes, nor that I now and then play deep, or drink deep, or follow up
with passionate determination any ruling propensity of the moment; but
because I am a discontented and unsettled man, who has a vague ambition
of being