'), but it is a supernatural effort, and--his
last. Soon after a murmur is heard from the crowd below, half raillery and
half compassion, and the poor adventurer slides down, mortified and
exhausted, upon the earth!

"So a courtier, having planned from his youth his career of ambition,
struggles up the ladder, lubric and precipitous, to the top--to the very
consummation of his hopes, and then falls back into the rubbish from which
he has issued; and they who envied his fortune, now rejoice in his fall.
What lessons of philosophy in a greasy pole! What moral reflections in a
spectacle so empty to the common world! What wholesome sermons are here
upon the vanity of human hopes, the disappointments of ambition, and the
difficulties of success in the slippery paths of fortune and human
greatness! But the very defeat of the last adventurer has shown the
_possibility_ of success, and prepared the way for his successor, who
mounts up and perches on the summit of the mast, bears off the crown, and
descends amidst the shouts and applause of the multitude. It is Americus
Vespucius who bears away from Columbus the recompense of his toils!"

So much for climbing a greased pole in reflective, philosophical Paris!

-------------------------------------

Inquisitiveness has been well described as "an itch for prying into other
people's affairs, to the neglect of our own; an ignorant hankering after
all such knowledge as is not worth knowing; a curiosity to learn things
that are not at all curious." People of this stamp would rather be "put to
the question" than not to ask questions. Silence is torture to them. A
genuine _quidnunc_ prefers even false news to _no_ news; he prides himself
upon having the first information of things that never happened. Yankees
are supposed to have attained the greatest art in parrying
inquisitiveness, but there is a story extant of a "Londoner" on his
travels in the provinces, who rather eclipses the cunning "Yankee
Peddler." In traveling post, says the narrator, he was obliged to stop at
a village to replace a shoe which his horse had lost; when the "Paul Pry"
of the place bustled up to the carriage-window, and without waiting for
the ceremony of an introduction, said:

"Good-morning, sir. Horse cast a shoe I see. I suppose, sir, you are going
to--?"

Here he paused, expecting the name of the place to be supplied; but the
gentleman answered:

"You are quite right; I generally go