their cynical chewing action!
It is said that a child sat next a dentist's apprentice once in an
omnibus, and was observed to turn rigid, fixed and white, but unable
to speak: he had sat on one of these skulls, and it had bitten him.
Silver-mounted skulls set as goblets, in imitation of Byron, are to
be seen at any of the china-shops rubbing against the chaste cheeks
of the old maid's teacup. Skeletons are sold, bleached and with gilded
hinges, to the medical students, who buy the pale horrors as openly
as meerschaum pipes. Have I not often found young Grandstone
supping among his doctors' apprentices of the Ober restaurant after
theatre-hours, a skeleton in the corner filled with umbrellas like
a hall-rack, and crowned with the triple or quintuple tiara of the
girls' best bonnets? Ay, Mimi Pinson's cap has known what it is to
perch on the bony head of Death. The juxtaposition is but an emblem.
The sewing-girl, like Hood's shirtmaker, scarcely fears the
'phantom of grisly bone.' Poor Francine! where have you taken _your_
artisanne's cap to, I wonder? Are you left alone, all alone again, and
thinking of the pretty solitude you have left behind you at Carlsruhe?
Who uses those polished keys now?"

Hohenfels interrupted me, complaining that my monologue was
uninteresting and diffuse, and was interfering with the railway
time-table. But I finished it in the car: "And the railway! What has
a person of fixed and independent habits to do with railways but
to growl at them? Before I was tempted upon the railway by that
impertinent engineer at Noisy, I got up and sat down when I liked, ate
wholesome food at my own hours, and was contented at home. Confusion
to him who made me the victim of his engineering calculations!
Confusion to Grandstone and his nest of serpents at Epernay! Did they
not introduce me to Fortnoye, who has doubly destroyed my peace? Where
are the conspirators, that I may pulverize them with my maledictions?"

[Illustration: BRUSSELS.]

This question--which Hohenfels called peevish as he buried himself in
his book--was not answered until we had passed Verviers, Chaudfontaine
and Liege. I was aroused from a sulky slumber in the station at
Brussels by Hohenfels, who said, in his musical scolding way, like the
busy wheeze of a clicking music-box, "You may say what you like, with
your left-handed flatteries, in regard to Fortnoye, and you may praise
Ariadnes and widows to the end of the chapter. You are sorry at