state. He has the forbidden fruit in his waistcoat pocket, and can make
himself a god as often and as long as he likes. He has raised himself
upon a glorious pedestal above his fellows; he has touched the summit of
ambition; and he envies neither King nor Kaiser, Prophet nor Priest,
content in an elevation as high as theirs, and much more easily
attained. Yes, certes, much more easily attained. He has not risen by
climbing himself, but by pushing others down. He has grown great in his
own estimation, not by blowing himself out, and risking the fate of
Aesop's frog, but simply by the habitual use of a diminishing glass on
everybody else. And I think altogether that his is a better, a safer,
and a surer recipe than most others.

After all, however, looking back on what I have written, I detect a
spirit suspiciously like his own. All through, I have been comparing
myself with our satirist, and all through, I have had the best of the
comparison. Well, well, contagion is as often mental as physical; and I
do not think my readers, who have all been under his lash, will blame me
very much for giving the headsman a mouthful of his own sawdust.

II

NUITS BLANCHES

If any one should know the pleasure and pain of a sleepless night, it
should be I. I remember, so long ago, the sickly child that woke from
his few hours' slumber with the sweat of a nightmare on his brow, to lie
awake and listen and long for the first signs of life among the silent
streets. These nights of pain and weariness are graven on my mind; and
so when the same thing happened to me again, everything that I heard or
saw was rather a recollection than a discovery.

Weighed upon by the opaque and almost sensible darkness, I listened
eagerly for anything to break the sepulchral quiet. But nothing came,
save, perhaps, an emphatic crack from the old cabinet that was made by
Deacon Brodie, or the dry rustle of the coals on the extinguished fire.
It was a calm; or I know that I should have heard in the roar and
clatter of the storm, as I have not heard it for so many years, the wild
career of a horseman, always scouring up from the distance and passing
swiftly below the window; yet always returning again from the place
whence first he came, as though, baffled by some higher power, he had
retraced his steps to gain impetus for another and another attempt.

As I lay there, there arose out of the utter stillness the rumbling of a
carriage a very great way o