d have been
lost. He would certainly never have worked, nor the artist have been
hatched out. Thus, while he deplored the old maid's grasping avarice,
his reason bid him prefer her iron hand to the life of idleness and
peril led by many of his fellow-countrymen.

This was the incident that had given rise to the coalition of female
energy and masculine feebleness--a contrast in union said not to be
uncommon in Poland.

In 1833 Mademoiselle Fischer, who sometimes worked into the night when
business was good, at about one o'clock one morning perceived a strong
smell of carbonic acid gas, and heard the groans of a dying man. The
fumes and the gasping came from a garret over the two rooms forming her
dwelling, and she supposed that a young man who had but lately come
to lodge in this attic--which had been vacant for three years--was
committing suicide. She ran upstairs, broke in the door by a push with
her peasant strength, and found the lodger writhing on a camp-bed in the
convulsions of death. She extinguished the brazier; the door was open,
the air rushed in, and the exile was saved. Then, when Lisbeth had
put him to bed like a patient, and he was asleep, she could detect the
motives of his suicide in the destitution of the rooms, where there was
nothing whatever but a wretched table, the camp-bed, and two chairs.

On the table lay a document, which she read:

"I am Count Wenceslas Steinbock, born at Prelia, in Livonia.

"No one is to be accused of my death; my reasons for killing
myself are, in the words of Kosciusko, _Finis Polonioe_!

"The grand-nephew of a valiant General under Charles XII. could
not beg. My weakly constitution forbids my taking military
service, and I yesterday saw the last of the hundred thalers which
I had brought with me from Dresden to Paris. I have left
twenty-five francs in the drawer of this table to pay the rent I owe
to the landlord.

"My parents being dead, my death will affect nobody. I desire that
my countrymen will not blame the French Government. I have never
registered myself as a refugee, and I have asked for nothing; I
have met none of my fellow-exiles; no one in Paris knows of my
existence.

"I am dying in Christian beliefs. May God forgive the last of the
Steinbocks!

"WENCESLAS."

Mademoiselle Fischer, deeply touched by the dying man's honesty, opened
the drawer and found the five five-franc pieces to pay his rent.

"Poor young