which seemed to reign royally at ease upon the open forehead of this strange being, could have occasioned effects so like the barking of a coward conscience at the memory of a crime?

Impossible to conceive! To me, at least, impossi

ble.

Once more the life of this man seemed to thrust itself upon my own, and this time with an imperious pretension to enter into the inmost circle of those ideas to the service of which I had dedicated my intelligence.

What had before allured me with the charm of a vague curiosity now impelled me with a command almost like that of a duty.

I felt bound to find again this mysterious personage; to enter his inner life as he had entered mine; and to initiate myself into his secret with all the arrogated rights of a lawful claimant to an idea, who has been unjustly ousted from his due possession. But my search was in vain.

I inquired at all the embassies; I inquired of the police; I inquired at the public hotels and the principal shops in Paris; and I utterly failed to find out any thing about Count R

I was at last forced to give up all hope of tracing him. He had probably left Paris.

Besides, the day fixed for my own departure was near at hand, and my friends declared it to be absolutely incumbent on me not to quit the French capital without having duly visited all the wonders of it.

I am sorry and ashamed to say that I had not the moral courage to resist this stupid imposition, and my

last days, therefore, were devoted to what is called "sight-seeing."

When I recall the days that are past, I am conscious of having submitted to so much needless discomfort and infructuous toil from a lazy inability to resist this sort of pretensions, that, bitterly lamenting the precious hours I have too often squandered in the payment of illegal imposts to unwarrantable prejudice, I am resolved for the future to prove myself a very Hampden in the matter of all such unjustifiable exactions. When I think of all I have suffered, and all that humanity is still suffering for the want of some Hampden-hearted man to vindicate the cause of individual freedom against this most odious of all direct taxes-the sight-seeing tax, which is a tax upon the eyes of a man-tumet jecur! my gorge rises, and the spleen of my just indignation-overflows into

CHAPTER VI.

ADVICE TO SIGHT-SEERS.

AFTER long stay in any place, in the moment when we are about to leave it, one thinks it a duty to see, in the most desperate hurry, every thing in that place which one has had no care to see at one's leisure.

Monuments, museums, parks, public buildings, collections-every thing, from prisons to pagodas, puts on the obnoxious form of a tax collector, and comes knocking at the doors of that respectable mansion, for which conscience already pays a sufficiently high rent to convention.

In that fretful, flurried, unsettling moment of man's fugitive life, when he is paying his bills and packing up his portmanteau, then is the time, of all others, when these importunate notorieties take mean advantage of his helpless condition, and voiciferously insist on a visit. There is no appeasing them but by submissive compliance with their demands; for they turn even our very friends into an army of touters. And we call this-"seeing the curiosities of the place."

Yet I can conceive of no objects which a man should be less curious to see than those of which he knows beforehand that he will never see them again. Oh that "wallet" of time, "wherein he puts alms for Oblivion!" Oh the things we stuff (and with what

haste!) into that lumber-room of passing impressions, from which Memory can never afterward fetch away a stick of serviceable furniture!

Animi fenestra oculi. How do we fritter and dribble away this grand capital of sight! For sight is a capital, and it is not inexhaustible. How do we impoverish the exchequer of the eye by changing golden ingots into copper coins for the purchase of an infinite number of things of farthing value! How will ye rise in the retrospect of judgment against us, all ye lost looks and squandered glances! Poor, wasted pocket-money of that rich spendthrift, Wantof-thought! Thefts from the sacred heritage of Beauty maladministered by idle hours, untrustworthy guardians of a property not theirs!

Oh dear Reader, if in the hour of thy departure from any place thine eye hath yet left a look to spare, give it rather to thy neighbor's dog; for he at least, in some sort, will render thee the worth of it by a last friendly wag of his tail; but hang it not up, like a worn-out garment never to be used again, on the stony, callous cornice of some monument dedicated by the impatience of a moment to the importunity of Oblivion.

Is it not distressing to see men of a sober conduct, in the last moment of leaving a place where, for so many months or years, they have lived at ease and in dignity, suddenly plagued with this sight-seeing fever, "grin like a dog, and run to and fro in the city?"

If you ask them why they do this, they have no better answer than that "every body does it."

What a frightful, invisible tyrant is this Every

Body, who respects not the humble independence of Any Body!

Well, if thou canst, content thee with this AUTÒç pa of the modern Pythagoreans. But as for me, eheu! eheu! what has it not cost me what sweat! what toil!—in the going up and down of interminable stairs! whereby, me Hercle! I believe that I have exuded in the sweat of my brow many thousand shillingworths of knowledge, for which, may the generation of guides and door-keepers, if they be not condemned to hard labor at the stone of Sisyphus on my account, remember me favorably to their fellow Charons of a better world!

As for those modern Pythagoreans, whenever by his ipse dixit I now detect one of them, I fear him as a man infected with a contagious disease. Fonum habet in cornu. I take the alarm, and avoid that man by all means in my power, inwardly praying (since I would not be uncharitable) that it may graciously please Providence to remove him speedily from this world, and, if possible, take him to itself.

Mayst thou also, oh dear Reader, be ever able on all such occasions to exclaim "Sic me servabit Apollo;" and whenever thou shalt be pestered by these false prophets crying "Lo here!" and "Lo there!" may Heaven send thee grace to withstand them!