ed into
their company by the cupidity of the former, contrary, not only to what
was due to the feelings and rights of men of more creditable callings,
but, as it was vehemently and plausibly insisted, to the very safety of
those who were about to trust their fortunes to the vicissitudes of the
elements.

Chance and the ingenuity of Baptiste had collected, on this occasion, as
party-colored and heterogeneous an assemblage of human passions,
interests, dialects, wishes, and opinions, as any admirer of diversity of
character could desire. There were several small traders, some returning
from adventures in Germany and France, and some bound southward, with
their scanty stock of wares; a few poor scholars, bent on a literary
pilgrimage to Rome; an artist or two, better provided with enthusiasm than
with either knowledge or taste, journeying with poetical longings towards
skies and tints of Italy; a _troupe_ of street jugglers, who had been
turning their Neapolitan buffoonery to account among the duller and less
sophisticated inhabitants of Swabia; divers lacqueys out of place; some
six or eight capitalists who lived on their wits, and a nameless herd of
that set which the French call bad "subjects;" a title that is just now,
oddly enough, disputed between the dregs of society and a class that would
fain become its exclusive leaders and lords.

These with some slight qualifications that it is not yet necessary to
particularise, composed that essential requisite of all fair
representation--the majority. Those who remained were of a different
caste. Near the noisy crowd of tossing heads and brandished arms, in and
around the gate, was a party containing the venerable and still fine
figure of a man in the travelling dress of one of superior condition, and
who did not need the testimony of the two or three liveried menials that
stood near his person, to give an assurance of his belonging to the more
fortunate of his fellow-creatures, as good and evil are usually estimated
in calculating the chances of life. On his arm leaned a female, so young,
and yet so lovely, as to cause regret in all who observed her fading
color, the sweet but melancholy smile that occasionally lighted her mild
and pleasing features, at some of the more marked exuberances of folly
among the crowd, and a form which, notwithstanding her lessened bloom, was
nearly perfect. If these symptoms of delicate health, did not prevent this
fair girl from being amused