most impassioned climaxes burst into guffaws.  My mice, as has been said, were overfed and lazy, and I used to have to poke them through their parts with sticks from the wings; but this was a detail which a superior imagination should have accepted as one of the conventions of the art.  It made the servants laugh, however; and when I would step to the front in person, and, with tears in my eyes, beseech them to be sober, they would but laugh the louder.  ’Bless you, sir, they’re only mice—­ce ne sont que des souris,’ the cook called out on one such occasion.  She meant it as an apology and a consolation, but it was the unkindest cut of all.  Only mice, indeed!  To me they had been a young gentleman and lady lost in the Desert of Sahara, near to die for the want of water, and about to be attacked, captured, and sold into slavery by a band of Bedouin Arabs.  Ah, well, the artist must steel himself to meet with indifference or derision from the public, to be ignored, misunderstood, or jeered at; and to rely for his real, his legitimate, reward on the pleasure he finds in his work.

And now there befell a great change in my life.  Our home in Paris was broken up, and we moved to St. Petersburg.  It was impossible to take my mice with us; their cage would have hopelessly complicated our impedimenta.  So we gave them to the children of our concierge.  Mercedes, however, I was resolved I would not part with, and I carried her all the way to the Russian capital by hand.  In my heart I was looking to her to found another family—­she had so frequently become a mother in the past.  But month succeeded month, and she for ever disappointed me, and at last I abandoned hope.  In solitude and exile Mercedes degenerated sadly; got monstrously fat; too indolent to gnaw, let her teeth grow to a preposterous length; and in the end died of a surfeit of smetana.

When I returned to Paris, at the age of twenty, to faire mon droit in the Latin Quarter, I paid a visit to our old house, and discovered the same old concierge in the loge.  I asked her about the mice, and she told me her children had found the care of them such a bother that at first they had neglected them, and at last allowed them to escape.  ’They took to the walls, and for a long time afterwards, Monsieur, the mice of this neighbourhood were pied.  To this day they are of a paler hue than elsewhere.’

A BROKEN LOOKING-GLASS

He climbed the three flights of stone stairs, and put his key into the lock; but before he turned it, he stopped—­to rest, to take breath.  On the door his name was painted in big white letters, Mr. Richard Dane.  It is always silent in the Temple at midnight; to-night the silence was dense, like a fog.  It was Sunday night; and on Sunday night, even within the hushed precincts of the Temple, one is conscious of a deeper hush.