which it was traced. So always, so inevitably.
As he lives on, satisfying one desire, one passion, after another, the
process of shrinking continues. A mortal disease sets in, which keeps
pace with the shrinking skin, and his life and his talisman come to an
end together.

One would say that such a piece of integument was hardly a desirable
possession. And yet, how many of us have at this very moment a peau de
chagrin of our own, diminishing with every costly wish indulged, and
incapable, like the magical one of the story, of being arrested in its
progress.

Need I say that I refer to those coupon bonds, issued in the days of
eight and ten per cent interest, and gradually narrowing as they drop
their semiannual slips of paper, which represent wishes to be realized,
as the roses let fall their leaves in July, as the icicles melt away in
the thaw of January?

How beautiful was the coupon bond, arrayed in its golden raiment of
promises to pay at certain stated intervals, for a goodly number
of coming years! What annual the horticulturist can show will bear
comparison with this product of auricultural industry, which has
flowered in midsummer and midwinter for twenty successive seasons?
And now the last of its blossoms is to be plucked, and the bare stem,
stripped of its ever maturing and always welcome appendages, is reduced
to the narrowest conditions of reproductive existence. Such is the fate
of the financial peau de chagrin. Pity the poor fractional capitalist,
who has just managed to live on the eight per cent of his coupon bonds.
The shears of Atropos were not more fatal to human life than the long
scissors which cut the last coupon to the lean proprietor, whose slice
of dry toast it served to flatter with oleomargarine. Do you wonder
that my thoughts took the poetical form, in the contemplation of these
changes and their melancholy consequences? If the entire poem, of
several hundred lines, was "declined with thanks" by an unfeeling
editor, that is no reason why you should not hear a verse or two of it.

THE PEAU DE CHAGRIN OF STATE STREET.

How beauteous is the bond
In the manifold array
Of its promises to pay,
While the eight per cent it gives
And the rate at which one lives
Correspond!

But at last the bough is bare
Where the coupons one by one
Through their ripening days have run,
And the bond, a beggar now,