The moral scale continues to rise: Blanche d'Antigny and Cora Pearl are ladies of honor at the Tuileries. The ----18--, at the moment when Vélocipède IV. is about to engage in a war with Prussia, which he thinks will consolidate his throne, but which, considering the organization of our artillery, threatens to extend the German frontiers as far as Saint-Ouen. France stops the drain of those ruinous imitations, drives out the Emperor, and again proclaims the Republic. This time, a thing wholly unexpected, some republicans are found who, after having energetically swept France clean of all that appertains to former systems, whether pretenders, office-holders, spies, etc., etc., push their logic even to the point of bolting the door inside, in order not to be interfered with in their loyal endeavor. This device, so simple, but by which we have passed three times in a century without seeing it, succeeds to admiration; and at length it is announced, the ---- 19--, that Vélocipède IV., after having been by turns, at London, keeper of a thirteen-sous bazaar, pickpocket, circus performer, magnetizer, and dealer in lead-pencils, dies in the flower of his age from the effects of a disease which his father did not contract while presiding at a meeting of his cabinet." With this specimen of _blague_ we may leave the caricaturists of France to fight it out with La Censure. CHAPTER XX. COMIC ART IN GERMANY. Upon the news-stands in St. Louis, Chicago, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Milwaukee, New York, and other cities, we find the comic periodicals of Germany, particularly the _Fliegende Blätter_ of Berlin, and the _Beilage der Fliegenden Blätter_ of Munchen, papers resembling _Punch_ in form and design. The American reader who turns over their leaves can not but remark the mildness of the German jokes. Compared with the tremendous and sometimes ghastly efforts of the dreadful Funny Man of the American press, the jests of the Germans are as lager-beer to the goading "cocktail" and the maddening "smash!" But, then, they are delightfully innocent. Coming from the French comic albums and papers to those of the Germans, is like emerging, after sunrise, from a masquerade ball, all gas, rouge, heat, and frenzy, into a field full of children playing till the bell rings for school. Nevertheless, the impression remains that an extremely mild joke suffices to amuse the German reader of comic periodicals. The pictured jests, as in _Punch_, are the attractive feature. Observe the infantile simplicity of a few of these, taken almost at random from recent volumes of the papers just mentioned: Two young girls, about twelve, are sitting upon a bench in a public garden. Two dandies walk past, who are dressed alike, and resemble one another. "Tell me, Fanny," says one of the girls, "are not those two gentlemen brothers?" This is the reply: "One of them is, I know for certain; but I am not quite sure about the other."