"Because two panniers are more easily borne than one, my Lily," answered her uncle, laughing again. The two girls united to scold him; and he replied with compliments, sometimes hyperbolical, sometimes bitter, and with much laughter, till his brother was roused from his deep studies, laid down the newspaper, drunk his coffee, and joined them at the window. "Well, Walter," he said, "I see those amusing Frenchmen have given a verdict of guilty, with extenuating circumstances, against another woman who has poisoned her husband with arsenic. He was kind, tender, affectionate, the evidence shows; forgave her a great many offences; and treated her with anything but harshness, though she certainly was not the best of wives. She poisoned him slowly, quietly, deliberately, that she might marry a paramour, who had already corrupted her. Yet they find 'extenuating circumstances.'" "To be sure," answered General Tracy. "Do you not see them, Arthur? You say, he forgave her a great number of offences, and consequently, did not do his duty to himself, or to her. But the truth is, these Frenchmen think murder better than execution; and, after massacring thousands of honest men, some forty or fifty years ago, will not now put one guilty man to death, though his crime is proved by irresistible evidence." "It is all slop," replied Mr. Arthur Tracy. "The word is, perhaps, a little vulgar, but yet I repeat it, 'It is all slop.' I will write an essay upon slop, someday; for we have just as much of it in England, as they have in France; only we shelter murder under a _monomania_, and the French under _extenuating_ circumstances. It is wonderful how slop is beginning to pervade all classes of society. It already affects even romance-writers and novelists. The people used to rejoice in blood and murder, so that an old circulating library was like a bear's den; nothing but gore and bones. But now one is sickened in every page, with maudling sentimentality, only fit for the second piece of a minor theatre. Love-sick dustmen, wronged and sentimental greengrocers; poetic and inspired costermongers; with a whole host of blind, lame, and deformed peasantry and paupers, transformed into angels and cherubs, by the assistance of a few clap-trap phrases, which have been already hackneyed for half a century on the stage. Slop, slop, Walter; it is all slop; and at the bottom of every kind of slop, is charlatanism." "Humbug, you mean," said his elder brother. "Why do you use a French word, when you can get an English one, Arthur?" "If the men really wished to defend the cause of the poor," continued Mr. Tracy, taking no notice of his brother's reproach, "why don't they paint them and their griefs as they really are? Did you ever see, Walter, in all your experience, such lackadaisical, poetical, white-aproned damsels amongst the lower classes, as we find in books now-a-days?"