Citoyen Tithon Riouffe _et femme_ had yet to experience the most extraordinary instance of that favouritism, by an after-display of which, towards those whom she has smitten without subduing, Fortune proclaims herself the least supernatural of goddesses. Truly, they had never thrown into the lottery of events with a faint heart; and now a first prize was to be the reward of their untiring persistency. Possibly, indeed, the papers of recommendation might have sufficed of themselves; yet that they would have carried us (having regard to our moulting condition, poor cage-worn sparrows! and the necessary slowness of our advance) in safety to the coast, I most strenuously doubt. Dear God! the soughing of the May wind, the whisper of the grasses, the liquid flutter of the stars, that were like lights reflected in a lake! The hour of ten saw us lifted to the plain in body--to the heavens in spirit. For freedom, we were flying from the land of liberty; for life, from the advocates of the Rights of Man. We sobbed and we embraced. “Some day,” we cried to Gusman, “we will come back and roll thee under a hogshead of schnapps!”--and then we set our faces to the north, and our teeth to a long task of endurance--one no less, indeed, than a sixty-league tramp up the half of the Isle de France and the whole of Picardie. Well, at least, as in the old days, we should walk together, with only the little rogue that laughs at locksmiths riding sedan between us. It was our design to skirt, at a reasonable distance, the east walls of the city, and to strike at Pantin, going by way of Gentilly and Bercy--the road to Meaux. Thence we would make, by a north-westerly course, the Amiens highway; and so, with full hearts and purses tight-belted for their hunger, for the pathetically distant sea. And all this we did, though not as we had foreseen. We toiled onwards in the dark throughout that first sweet night of liberty. For seven hours we tramped without resting; and then, ten miles north of the walls, we lay down under the lee of a skilling, and, rolled in one another’s arms, slept for four hours like moles. * * * * * * * I woke to the prick of rain upon my face. Before my half-conscious eyes a hectic spot faded and went wan in a grey miasma like death. It was the sun--the cheek of the virgin day, grown chill in a premature decline. I sat up. From the south-west, like the breath of the fatal city pursuing us, a melancholy draft of cloud flowed and spread itself, making for the northern horizon. It wreathed in driving swirls and ripples, as if it were the very surface of a stream that ran above us; and, indeed almost before we were moved to a full wakefulness, we were as sopt as though we lay under water.