who watched with a suspicious eye the little man who
gesticulated and shook his head so earnestly, the poor visionary did
not awake. He joyously imagined himself returning home, telling the
news to his daughters, and taking them to the theatre in the evening to
celebrate that happy day. God! how pretty the Joyeuse girls were,
sitting in the front of their box! what a nosegay of rosy cheeks! And
then, on the next day, lo and behold the two oldest are sought in
marriage by--Impossible to say by whom, for M. Joyeuse suddenly found
himself under the porch of the Hemerlingue establishment, in front of a
swing-door surmounted by the words, "Counting Room" in gold letters.

"I shall always be the same," he said to himself with a little laugh,
wiping his forehead, on which the perspiration stood in beads.

Put in good humor by his fancy, by the blazing fires in the long line
of offices, with inlaid floors and wire gratings, keeping the secrets
confided to them in the subdued light of the ground floor, where one
could count gold pieces without being dazzled by them, M. Joyeuse bade
the other clerks a cheery good-morning, and donned his working-coat and
black velvet cap. Suddenly there was a whistle from above; and the
cashier, putting his ear to the tube, heard the coarse, gelatinous
voice of Hemerlingue, the only, the genuine Hemerlingue--the other, the
son, was always absent--asking for M. Joyeuse. What! was he still
dreaming? He was greatly excited as he took the little inner stairway,
which he had ascended so jauntily just before, and found himself in the
banker's office, a narrow room with a very high ceiling, and with no
other furniture than green curtains and enormous leather arm-chairs,
proportioned to the formidable bulk of the head of the house. He was
sitting there at his desk, which his paunch prevented him from
approaching, corpulent, puffing, and so yellow that his round face with
its hooked nose, the face of a fat, diseased owl, shone like a beacon
light in that solemn, gloomy office. A coarse, Moorish merchant
mouldering in the dampness of his little courtyard. His eyes gleamed an
instant beneath his heavy slow-moving eyelids when the clerk entered;
he motioned to him to approach, and slowly, coldly, with frequent
breaks in his breathless sentences, instead of: "M. Joyeuse, how many
daughters have you?" he said this:

"Joyeuse, you have assumed to criticize in our offices our recent
operations on the market in