in which the future is determined by a few throws? Why seek
the risk of extreme chances? For what end hasten to riches by dangerous
roads? Is it really certain that happiness is the prize of brilliant
successes, rather than of a wisely accepted poverty? Ah! if men but
knew in what a small dwelling joy can live, and how little it costs to
furnish it!

Twelve o'clock.--I have been walking up and down my attic for a long
time, with my arms folded and my eyes on the ground! My doubts increase,
like shadows encroaching more and more on some bright space; my fears
multiply; and the uncertainty becomes every moment more painful to me!
It is necessary for me to decide to-day, and before the evening! I hold
the dice of my future fate in my hands, and I dare not throw them.

Three o'clock.--The sky has become cloudy, and a cold wind begins to
blow from the west; all the windows which were opened to the sunshine of
a beautiful day are shut again. Only on the opposite side of the street,
the lodger on the last story has not yet left his balcony.

One knows him to be a soldier by his regular walk, his gray moustaches,
and the ribbon that decorates his buttonhole. Indeed, one might have
guessed as much from the care he takes of the little garden which is the
ornament of his balcony in mid-air; for there are two things especially
loved by all old soldiers--flowers and children. They have been so long,
obliged to look upon the earth as a field of battle, and so long cut off
from the peaceful pleasures of a quiet lot, that they seem to begin life
at an age when others end it. The tastes of their early years, which
were arrested by the stern duties of war, suddenly break out again with
their white hairs, and are like the savings of youth which they spend
again in old age. Besides, they have been condemned to be destroyers for
so long that perhaps they feel a secret pleasure in creating, and
seeing life spring up again: the beauty of weakness has a grace and
an attraction the more for those who have been the agents of unbending
force; and the watching over the frail germs of life has all the charms
of novelty for these old workmen of death.

Therefore the cold wind has not driven my neighbor from his balcony.
He is digging up the earth in his green boxes, and carefully sowing the
seeds of the scarlet nasturtium, convolvulus, and sweet-pea. Henceforth
he will come every day to watch for their first sprouting, to protect
the young shoot