fied bootsole
and foot; discerns next instant--the point of a gimlet or brad-awl
playing up, through the firm deal-board, and now hastily drawing itself
back! Mystery, perhaps Treason? The wooden frame-work is impetuously
broken up; and behold, verily a mystery; never explicable fully to the
end of the world! Two human individuals, of mean aspect, one of them
with a wooden leg, lie ensconced there, gimlet in hand: they must have
come in overnight; they have a supply of provisions,--no 'barrel of
gunpowder' that one can see; they affect to be asleep; look blank
enough, and give the lamest account of themselves. "Mere curiosity; they
were boring up to get an eye-hole; to see, perhaps 'with lubricity,'
whatsoever, from that new point of vision, could be seen:"--little that
was edifying, one would think! But indeed what stupidest thing may not
human Dulness, Pruriency, Lubricity, Chance and the Devil, choosing Two
out of Half-a-million idle human heads, tempt them to? (Hist. Parl. xi.
104-7.)

Sure enough, the two human individuals with their gimlet are there.
Ill-starred pair of individuals! For the result of it all is that
Patriotism, fretting itself, in this state of nervous excitability,
with hypotheses, suspicions and reports, keeps questioning these two
distracted human individuals, and again questioning them; claps them
into the nearest Guardhouse, clutches them out again; one hypothetic
group snatching them from another: till finally, in such extreme state
of nervous excitability, Patriotism hangs them as spies of Sieur Motier;
and the life and secret is choked out of them forevermore. Forevermore,
alas! Or is a day to be looked for when these two evidently mean
individuals, who are human nevertheless, will become Historical Riddles;
and, like him of the Iron Mask (also a human individual, and evidently
nothing more),--have their Dissertations? To us this only is certain,
that they had a gimlet, provisions and a wooden leg; and have died there
on the Lanterne, as the unluckiest fools might die.

And so the signature goes on, in a still more excited manner. And
Chaumette, for Antiquarians possess the very Paper to this hour, (Ibid.
xi. 113, &c.)--has signed himself 'in a flowing saucy hand slightly
leaned;' and Hebert, detestable Pere Duchene, as if 'an inked spider had
dropped on the paper;' Usher Maillard also has signed, and many Crosses,
which cannot write. And Paris, through its thousand avenues, is welling
to