"Not for a hundred pistoles!" cried the principal sergeant. "Nay, nay," said the landlord, who had remained in the room, "worthy sergeant, you must not be too severe upon my young lodger. Consider his youth and inexperience. Echimillia is a tender-hearted man, and would not wish you to be hard upon him. Take a hundred pistoles and let him off." The sergeant began to show symptoms of a relenting disposition, and expressed his pity of my youth and ignorance of the ways of Paris with so much tender-heartedness, that it overcame my gravity, and sitting down upon a chair I laughed till I cried. The two sergeants looked rather confounded; but the greffier, a little man, whose risible organs were apparently somewhat irritable, could not resist the infectious nature of my laugh, but began a low sort of cachinnation, which he unsuccessfully tried either to drown in a cough or stifle in the sleeve of his robe. The sympathy next affected the landlord, who, after looking wistfully first to one and then to another, with one eyebrow raised, and one corner of his mouth in a grin while the other struggled for gravity for near a minute, was at length overpowered by the greffier's efforts to smother his laughter, and burst forth, shaking his fat sides till the room rang. The sergeant at the door tittered; but the principal officer affected a fury that soon brought me to myself, though in a very different manner from that which he expected. Starting upon my feet, I caught him by the collar, and knocking his bonnet off his head, exposed to view the very identical person of my hectoring guide of the night before, though he had ingeniously contrived to change completely the shape of his face, by cutting his immense beard into a small peak, shaving each of his cheeks, and leaving nothing but a light moustache upon his upper lip. "Scoundrel!" cried I, giving him a shake that almost tore his borrowed plumes to pieces, "what, in the name of the devil, tempted you to think you could impose on me with a stale trick like this?" "Because you dined at a _table d'hote_ in Flemish lace," replied the other sergeant, continuing to chuckle at his companion's misfortune. "But come, young sir, you must let him go, though you have found him out." And thereupon he threw back his robe, and grasped the sword which it concealed. As I had imagined, my man of war was as arrant a coward as ever swore a big oath, and he trembled violently under my hands, till he saw his more valiant comrade begin to espouse his cause so manfully. He then, however, thought it was his cue to bully, and exclaimed, in his natural voice, "Unhand me, or, by the heart of my father, I'll dash you to atoms!"