A watering-place at the close of a season is always a sad-looking thing. The barricades of the coming winter already begin to show; the little statues in public gardens are assuming their greatcoats of straw against the rigours of frost; the _jets d’ eau_ cease to play, or perform with the unwilling air of actors to empty benches; the tables d’hôte present their long dinner-rooms unoccupied, save by a little table at one end, where some half-dozen shivering inmates still remain, the débris of the mighty army who flourished their knives there but six weeks before-- these half-dozen usually consisting of a stray invalid or two, completing his course of the waters, having a fortnight of sulphuretted hydrogen before him yet, and not daring to budge till he has finished his ‘heeltap’ of abomination. Then there’s the old half-pay major, that has lived in Spa, for aught I know, since the siege of Namur, and who passes his nine months of winter in shooting quails and playing dominoes; and there’s an elderly lady, with spectacles, always working at a little embroidery frame, who speaks no French, and seems not to be aware of anything going on around her--no one being able to guess why she is there, she probably not knowing why herself. Lastly, there is a very distracted-looking young gentleman, with a shooting-jacket and young moustaches, who having been ‘cleaned out’ at _rouge et noir_, is waiting in the hope of a remittance from some commiserating relative in England. The theatre is closed; its little stars, dispersed among the small capitals, have shrunk back to their former proportions of third and fourth-rate parts--for though butterflies in July, they are mere grubs in December. The clink of the croupier’s mace is no longer heard, revelling amid the five-franc pieces; all is still and silent in that room which so late the conflict of human passion, hope, envy, fear, and despair, had made a very hell on earth. The donkeys, too, who but the other day were decked in scarlet trappings, are now despoiled of their gay panoply, and condemned to the mean drudgery of the cart. Poor beasts! their drooping ears and fallen heads seem to show some sense of their changed fortunes; no longer bearing the burden of some fair-cheeked girl or laughing boy along the mountain-side, they are brought down to the daily labour of the cottage, and a cutlet is no more like a mutton-chop than a donkey is like an ass.