He observed the natural ease that pervaded all the actions of those with whom he was brought into contact in the upper world, and their complete lack of self-consciousness, their naturalness, simplicity, in all they said and did. He had not got it—he could not acquire it, he was like a maid-of-all work from a farmhouse on a market day in the county town wearing a Mephistopheles hat on her red head, and ten-button gloves on her mottled arms. He was conscious of his self-consciousness—he feared it would be remarked. It made him suspicious and envious and angry. He could not reach to the ease of those above him, and therefore he desired to level them to his own plane. A man with black blood in his veins is fearful lest those at the table should look at his nails. Jingles was ever dreading lest some chance glance should discover the want of breed in himself. This caused him much misery; and this all came of his carrying about the cow-self with him into my lady’s boudoir, and my lord’s study, to the dining-room, and to the parlour. I was at the autumn fair some years ago at Liège; on the boulevards were streets of booths, some for the sale of cakes and toys, others shows; but, as among the stalls those for cakes prevailed, so among the shows did the Rigolade Parisienne preponderate. Not having the faintest conception of what the Rigolade was, I paid my sou and entered one in quest of knowledge; and this is what I saw—a series of mirrors. But there was this peculiar about the mirrors, one was convex, and in it I beheld my nose reduced to a pimple, and my eyes to currants; another was concave, in which my nose swelled to a proboscis and my eyes to plums. A third mirror multiplied my face fifty times. A fourth showed me my face elongated, as when my MS. has been returned “not suited,” from an editor; a fifth widened my face to an absurd grin; in a sixth I saw my pleasant self magnified in serene and smiling beauty in the midst, and showed me every surrounding person and object, the faces of men, the houses, the cathedral, the sky, the sun, all distorted out of shape and proportions. “Eh ça, M’sou,” said the showman, “c’est la véritable Rigolade Parisienne.” Eh ça—my dear readers, was Giles Inglett Saltren’s vision of life. He saw himself, infinitely magnified, and everything else dwarfed about him and tortured into monstrosity. Of one thing I am very certain, dear reader, in this great Rigolade of life into which we have entered, and through which we are walking, there are some who are always seeing themselves in the multiplying mirror, and there are others who contemplate their faces continually elongated, whilst others again see themselves in the widening mirror and accommodate themselves to be the perpetual buffoon. Let us trust that these are not many, but there certainly are some who view themselves enlarged, and view everything and every person beside, the world about them, the heaven above them, in a state of distortion.