to the poor, it will be absurd to
think of giving anything to them. Are you not poor yourself? And then
there is the painful question of dress. To have to refuse a wife a new
ribbon, what a torture! To have to refuse one who has made you a gift of
her beauty a trifling article; to haggle over such matters, like a
miser! Perhaps she will say to you, "What! rob my garden of its flowers,
and now refuse one for my bonnet!" Ah me! to have to condemn her to
shabby dresses. The family table is silent. You fancy that those around
it think harshly of you. Beloved faces have become clouded. This is what
is meant by falling fortunes. It is to die day by day. To be struck down
is like the blast of the furnace; to decay like this is the torture of
the slow fire.

An overwhelming blow is a sort of Waterloo, a slow decay, a St. Helena.
Destiny, incarnate in the form of Wellington, has still some dignity;
but how sordid in the shape of Hudson Lowe. Fate becomes then a paltry
huckster. We find the man of Campo Formio quarrelling about a pair of
stockings; we see that dwarfing of Napoleon which makes England less.
Waterloo and St. Helena! Reduced to humbler proportions, every ruined
man has traversed those two phases.

On the evening we have mentioned, and which was one of the first
evenings in May, Lethierry, leaving Deruchette to walk by moonlight in
the garden, had gone to bed more depressed than ever.

All these mean and repulsive details, peculiar to worldly misfortune;
all these trifling cares, which are at first insipid, and afterwards
harassing, were revolving in his mind. A sullen load of miseries! Mess
Lethierry felt that his fall was irremediable. What could he do? What
would become of them? What sacrifices should he be compelled to impose
on Deruchette? Whom should he discharge--Douce or Grace? Would they have
to sell the Bravees? Would they not be compelled to leave the island? To
be nothing where he had been everything; it was a terrible fall indeed.

And to know that the old times had gone for ever! To recall those
journeys to and fro, uniting France with those numberless islands; the
Tuesday's departure, the Friday's return, the crowd on the quay, those
great cargoes, that industry, that prosperity, that proud direct
navigation, that machinery embodying the will of man, that all-powerful
boiler, that smoke, all that reality! The steamboat had been the final
crown of the compass; the needle indicating the direct track,