eating and drinking?"

"Why, you see, in the first place, my father was a bone-grubber."

"The devil he was!" said Dumoulin, somewhat out of countenance, though in
general not over-scrupulous in the choice of his bottle-companions: but,
after the first surprise, he resumed, with the most charming amenity:
"There are some rag-pickers very high by scent--I mean descent!"

"To be sure! you may think to laugh at me," said Jacques, "but you are
right in this respect, for my father was a man of very great merit. He
spoke Greek and Latin like a scholar, and often told me that he had not
his equal in mathematics; besides, he had travelled a good deal."

"Well, then," resumed Dumoulin, whom surprise had partly sobered, "you
may belong to the family of the Counts of Rennepont, after all."

"In which case," said Rose-Pompon, laughing, "your father was not a
gutter-snipe by trade, but only for the honor of the thing."

"No, no--worse luck! it was to earn his living," replied Jacques; "but,
in his youth, he had been well off. By what appeared, or rather by what
did not appear, he had applied to some rich relation, and the rich
relation had said to him: 'Much obliged! try the work'us.' Then he wished
to make use of his Greek, and Latin, and mathematics. Impossible to do
anything--Paris, it seems, being choke-full of learned men--so my father
had to look for his bread at the end of a hooked stick, and there, too,
he must have found it, for I ate of it during two years, when I came to
live with him after the death of an aunt, with whom I had been staying in
the country."

"Your respectable father must have been a sort of philosopher," said
Dumoulin; "but, unless he found an inheritance in a dustbin, I don't see
how you came into your property."

"Wait for the end of the song. At twelve years of age I was an apprentice
at the factory of M. Tripeaud; two years afterwards, my father died of an
accident, leaving me the furniture of our garret--a mattress, a chair,
and a table--and, moreover, in an old Eau de Cologne box, some papers
(written, it seems, in English), and a bronze medal, worth about ten
sous, chain and all. He had never spoken to me of these papers, so, not
knowing if they were good for anything, I left them at the bottom of an
old trunk, instead of burning them--which was well for me, since it is
upon these papers that I have had money advanced."

"What a godsend!" said Dumoulin. "But somebody must have known that yo