Chamberss Edinburgh Journal, No. 442 | Page 9

pause. 'An
examination shall at all events take place at nightfall. You, in the
meantime, remain here under surveillance.'
Between eleven and twelve o'clock, Le Bossu was again brought into
M. Huguet's presence. The commissary who arrested his father was
also there. 'You have made a surprising guess, if it be a guess,' said the
procureur. 'The missing property has been found under a hearth-stone
of the centre house.' Le Bossu raised his hands, and uttered a cry of
delight. 'One moment,' continued M. Huguet. 'How do we know this is
not a trick concocted by you and your father to mislead justice?'
'I have thought of that,' replied Le Bossu calmly. 'Let it be given out
that I am under restraint, in compliance with Nadaud's request; then
have some scaffolding placed to-morrow against the houses, as if
preparatory to their being pulled down, and you will see the result, if a
quiet watch is kept during the night.' The procureur and commissary
exchanged glances, and Le Bossu was removed from the room.

It was verging upon three o'clock in the morning, when the watchers
heard some one very quietly remove a portion of the back-boarding of
the centre house. Presently, a closely-muffled figure, with a
dark-lantern and a bag in his hand, crept through the opening, and made
direct for the hearth-stone; lifted it, turned on his light slowly, gathered
up the treasure, crammed it into his bag, and murmured with an
exulting chuckle as he reclosed the lantern and stood upright:
'Safe--safe, at last!' At the instant, the light of half a dozen lanterns
flashed upon the miserable wretch, revealing the stern faces of as many
gendarmes. 'Quite safe, M. Pierre Nadaud!' echoed their leader. 'Of that
you may be assured.' He was unheard: the detected culprit had fainted.
There is little to add. Nadaud perished by the guillotine, and Delessert
was, after a time, liberated. Whether or not he thought his ill-gotten
property had brought a curse with it, I cannot say; but, at all events, he
abandoned it to the notary's heirs, and set off with Le Bossu for Paris,
where, I believe, the sign of 'Delessert et Fils, Ferblantiers,' still
flourishes over the front of a respectably furnished shop.

PHILOSOPHY OF THE SHEARS.
The vestiarian profession has always been ill-treated by the world. Men
have owed much, and in more senses than one, to their tailors, and have
been accustomed to pay their debt in sneers and railleries--often in
nothing else. The stage character of the tailor is stereotyped from
generation to generation; his goose is a perennial pun; and his habitual
melancholy is derived to this day from the flatulent diet on which he
will persist in living--cabbage. He is effeminate, cowardly, dishonest--a
mere fraction of a man both in soul and body. He is represented by the
thinnest fellow in the company; his starved person and frightened look
are the unfailing signals for a laugh; and he is never spoken to but in a
gibe at his trade:
'Thou liest, thou thread, Thou thimble, Thou yard, three-quarters,
half-yard, quarter, nail; Away thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant; Or
I shall so bemete thee with thy yard, As thou shalt think on prating

while thou liv'st!'
All this is not a very favourable specimen of the way in which the stage
holds the mirror up to nature. We may suppose that a certain character
of effeminacy attached to a tailor in that olden time when he was the
fashioner for women as well as men; but now that he has no
professional dealings with the fair sex but when they assume masculine
'habits,' it is unreasonable to continue the stigma. In like manner, when
the cloth belonged to the customer, it was allowable enough to suspect
him of a little amiable weakness for cabbage; but now that he is himself
the clothier, the joke is pointless and absurd. Tailors, however, can
afford to laugh, as well as other people, at their conventional double--or
rather ninth, for at least in our own day they have wrought very hard to
elevate their calling into a science. The period of lace and frippery of
all kinds has passed away, and this is the era of simple form, in which
sartorial genius has only cloth to work upon as severely plain as the
statuary's marble. It is true, we ourselves do not understand the
'anatomical principles' on which the more philosophical of the craft
proceed, nor does our scholarship carry us quite the length of their
Greek (?) terminology; but we acknowledge the result in their
workmanship, although we cannot trace the steps by which it is brought
about.
Very different is the plan now from what it was in the days of Shemus
nan Snachad, James of the