Lippincotts Magazine, August 1873 | Page 7

are worth fully forty francs apiece."
"Only look, sir, at their claws and bills, see their tongues, and observe
under their wings: they are young, wholesome and of fine strain--"
He was running on when I stopped him: "Here are a hundred francs for
you, brave man."
The patchwork blouse cut a caper, a look of lively joy shot from the
man's eyes, where a tear was gathering, and the wagon, from its
bursting cover, gave utterance to a sob.
"Why sell them," I asked, touched in spite of myself, "if you are so
attached to them? Is the money indispensable to you? I might possibly
make an advance."
"Ah, you are a real Christian--you are now," said the honest Joliet,
polishing his eyeball with his coat-cuff. "The good woman holds by
them, it is true. Holy Virgin! it's she that has raised them, and I may say
brooded over them in the coop. The eggs were for our salad when we
had nothing better than nettles and sorrel. But, day in and night in, we
have no other lodging than our wagon, and the wife is promising to
give me a dolly; and if we don't take out the cage, where will the cradle
go, sir?"
[Illustration: THE PRESENT.]
The calculation appeared reasonable. I received the birds, and they

were the heroes, in their boudoir under the piano, of that night's
conversazione.
[Illustration: THE CONVALESCENT.]
[Illustration: THE DIVIDED BURDEN.]
How hard it is for a life cast upon the crowded shores of the Old World
to regain the place once lost is shown by the history of my honest
friend Joliet. Born in 1812, of an excellent family living twenty miles
from Versailles, the little fellow lost his mother before he could talk to
her. When he was ten years old, his father, who had failed after some
land speculations, and had turned all he had into money, tossed him up
to the lintel of the doorway, kissed him, put a twenty-franc gold-piece
into his little pocket, and went away to seek his fortune in Louisiana:
the son never heard of him more. The lady-president of a charitable
society, Mademoiselle Marx, took pity on the abandoned child: she fed
him on bones and occasionally beat him. She was an ingenious and
inventive creature, and made her own cat-o'-nine-tails: an inventor is
for ever demonstrating the merits of his implement. Soon, discovering
that he was thankless and unteachable, she made him enter, as youngest
clerk, the law-office of her admirer and attorney, Constabule. This
gentleman, not finding enough engrossing work to keep the lad out of
mischief, allowed him to sweep his rooms and blacken his boots. Little
Joliet, after giving a volatile air to a great many of his employer's briefs
by making paper chickens of them, showed his imperfect sense of the
favors done him by absconding. In fact, proud and independent, he was
brooding over boyish schemes of an honorable living and a hasty
fortune. He soon found that every profession required an apprenticeship,
and that an apprenticeship could only be bought for money. He was
obliged, then, to seek his grand fortune through somewhat obscure
avenues. If I were to follow my poor Joliet through all his
transmigrations and metempsychoses, as I have learned them by his
hints, allusions and confessions, I should show him by turns working a
rope ferry, where the stupid and indolent cattle, whose business it is to
draw men, were drawn by him; then letter-carrier; supernumerary and
call-boy in a village theatre; road-mender on a vicinal route; then a
beadle, a bell-ringer, and a sub-teacher in an infant school, where he
distributed his own ignorance impartially amongst his little patrons at
the end of a stick; after this, big drum in the New Year's festivals, and

ready at a moment's opportunity to throw down the drumstick and
plunge among the dancers, for Joliet was a well-hinged lad, and the
blood of nineteen years was tingling in his heels. After fluttering thus
from branch to branch, like the poor birdling that cannot take its flight,
discouraged by his wretched attempts at life, he plunged straight before
him, hoping for nothing but a turn of luck, driving over the roads and
fields, lending a hand to the farmers, sleeping in stables and garrets, or
oftener in the open air; sometimes charitably sheltered in a kind man's
barn, and perhaps--oh bliss!--honestly employed with him for a week or
two; at others rudely repulsed as a good-for-nothing and vagabond.
Vagabond! That truly was his profession now. He forgot the charms of
a fixed abode. He came to like his gypsy freedom, the open air and
complete independence. He laughed at his misery, provided it shifted
its place occasionally.
[Illustration: SHARE MY CUP.]
[Illustration: BREAKING STONES.]
One day,