s a widower, do you aver, on your
conscience and honor, that mothers will not be found to offer their
young girls to supply the lamented lady's place? How stale this
misanthropy is! Something must have disagreed with this cynic. Yes, my
good woman. I dare say you would like to call another subject. Yes,
my fine fellow; ogre at home, supple as a dancing-master abroad, and
shaking in thy pumps, and wearing a horrible grin of sham gayety to
conceal thy terror, lest I should point thee out:--thou art prosperous
and honored, art thou? I say thou hast been a tyrant and a robber. Thou
hast plundered the poor. Thou hast bullied the weak. Thou hast laid
violent hands on the goods of the innocent and confiding. Thou hast made
a prey of the meek and gentle who asked for thy protection. Thou hast
been hard to thy kinsfolk, and cruel to thy family. Go, monster! Ah,
when shall little Jack come and drill daylight through thy wicked
cannibal carcass? I see the ogre pass on, bowing right and left to the
company; and he gives a dreadful sidelong glance of suspicion as he is
talking to my lord bishop in the corner there.

Ogres in our days need not be giants at all. In former times, and in
children's books, where it is necessary to paint your moral in such
large letters that there can be no mistake about it, ogres are made with
that enormous mouth and ratelier which you know of, and with which they
can swallow down a baby, almost without using that great knife which
they always carry. They are too cunning now-a-days. They go about in
society, slim, small, quietly dressed, and showing no especially great
appetite. In my own young days there used to be play ogres--men who
would devour a young fellow in one sitting, and leave him without a bit
of flesh on his bones. They were quiet gentlemanlike-looking people.
They got the young fellow into their cave. Champagne, pate-de-foie-gras,
and numberless good things, were handed about; and then, having eaten,
the young man was devoured in his turn. I believe these card and dice
ogres have died away almost as entirely as the hasty-pudding giants whom
Tom Thumb overcame. Now, there are ogres in City courts who lure you
into their dens. About our Cornish mines I am told there are many most
plausible ogres, who tempt you into their caverns and pick your bones
there. In a certain newspaper there used to be lately a whole column
of advertisements from ogres who would put on the most plausible, nay,
piteo