The astonished and drenched Frenchman, who, like the rest of his comrades, had been indulging in the Parisian luxury of a pipe in bed, and who had fallen asleep with his large “meerschaum” still alight in his mouth, hearing the shriek of a female, immediately sprang from his bed, and darted off after the lady, in the hope of making her explain and apologize for the unceremonious manner in which she had roused him from his slumbers. Mrs. Sandboys, however, had so good a start of the foreigner, that she was able to reach her apartment before he could lay hold of her; and then rushing into it, she slammed to the door, and throwing herself upon her beloved Cursty, fell shrieking and kicking and crying, “There’s a man, Cursty—there’s a man!” Mr. Sandboys, on being roused so suddenly, required to shake himself two or three times before he could collect himself sufficiently to comprehend whether or not he was finishing the nightmare that the cold rice-pudding had produced. At length, however, he had a vague, indistinct recollection of his wife having previously roused him with an alarm of thieves; so, making up his mind that this was the cause of his Aggy’s fright, and that she had been actually pursued by some daring burglar, he dashed from his bed-room armed with a good stout stick. Immediately outside the door he encountered the Frenchman, who was busy in the dark, feeling for some mark by which he could recognise the apartment in the morning. Cursty no sooner laid hands upon the strange man, than he prepared to seize him by the throat. On attempting to do this, he discovered, to his great surprise, that the supposed housebreaker was “bearded like the pard;” accordingly, he grasped, with a tight hold, the hairy appendage to the foreigner’s chin with one hand, while with the other he proceeded, with his ash stick, to belabour him, in his shirt as he was, till his cries raised the whole house. Then the ladies, maids and all, threw up the windows of their bed-rooms, and proceeded, some to shriek “Police!” others to scream “Murder!” and “Thieves!” while the rest busied themselves with springing the entire battery of watchmen’s rattles that were kept, for the safety of the young ladies, always at hand on the premises. Mrs. Wewitz, when she discovered the cause of the disturbance, was more alarmed than ever; for she plainly began to perceive that the eight-and-forty Frenchmen, whom in a moment of weakness she had admitted within the sacred precincts of “Parthenon House,” would ultimately bring ruin upon the hitherto unsullied reputation of her daughter’s “Establishment for Young Ladies.” Mrs. Sandboys, on becoming acquainted with the fact that she and her daughter were living beneath the same roof with nearly half a hundred Frenchmen, grew extremely uneasy at not only the proverbial amatory tendency of the dispositions of _jeune France_, but the equally notorious want of cleanliness in the natives of the same enlightened country.