Within a few days of Christmas came the following letter from M. Fleurus:-- _From Jacques Rousseau Fleurus to Horatio Paget_. Hotel de la Pucelle, place Jeanne d'Arc, Rouen, 21st December, 186--. MONSIEUR,--After exertions incalculable, after labours herculean, I come to learn something of your Susan Meynell,--more, I come to learn of her marriage. But I will begin at the beginning of things. The labours, the time, the efforts, the courage, the patience, the--I will say it without to blush--the genius which this enterprise has cost me, I will not enlarge upon. There are things which cannot tell themselves. To commence, I will tell you how I went to Rouen, how I advertised in the journals of Rouen, and asked among the people of Rouen--at shops, at hotels, by the help of my allies, the police, by means which you, in your inexperience of this science of research, could not even figure to yourself--always seeking the trace of this woman Meynell. It was all pain lost. Of this woman Meynell in Rouen there was no trace. In the end I enraged myself. "Imbecile!" I said to myself, "why seek in this dull commercial city, among this heavy people, for that which thou shouldst seek only in the centre of all things? As the rivers go to the ocean, so flow all the streams of human life to the one great central ocean of humanity--PARIS! It is there the Alpha and the Omega--there the mighty heart through which the blood of all the body must be pumped, and is pumping always," I say to myself, unconsciously rising to the sublimity of my great countryman, Hugo, in whose verse I find an echo of my own soul, and whose compositions I flatter myself I could have surpassed, if I had devoted to the Muses the time and the powers which I have squandered on a _vilain_ metier, that demands the genius of a Talleyrand, and rewards with the crust of an artisan. In Paris, then, I will seek the woman Meynell, and to Paris I go. In my place an inexperienced person would advertise in the most considerable papers; would invite Susan Meynell to hear of something to her advantage; and would bring together a crowd of false Susan Meynells, greedy to obtain the benefice. Me, I do nothing in this style there. On the contrary, in the most obscure little journals of Paris I publish a modest little advertisement as from the brother of Susan Meynell, who implores his sister to visit him on his deathbed. Here are follies, you will say. Since Susan Meynell is dead it is thirty years, and her brother is dead also. Ah, how you are dull, you insulars, and how impossible for your foggy island to produce a Fouche, a Canler, a genius of police, a Columbus of the subterranean darknesses of your city.