welded on to the every-day, commonplace, conventional relations of things, cannot understand souls which place themselves in antagonism to these relations. And therefore it is that humorists are so rare in the hereditary kingdoms of women, courts--and in their realm of shadows, France. Lenette could not be otherwise than much, and continually, vexed and annoyed with this whistling, singing, dancing husband of hers--a man who didn't behave to his very clients with anything like proper professional gravity; who, sad to say--and people assured her it was a fact--often walked in circles round the gallows on the hill,--concerning whose sanity sensible people spoke very doubtfully--as to whom she complained, that you would never think, to see him, that he lived in a royal burgh, the capital of the province--and who was respectful and reserved only before one person in the world, namely, himself. Why, when maidservants, from the very best houses in the place, came in--with linen to be made up, and so on--didn't they very often see him jump up and, without a "With your leave," or "By your leave," to anybody, run to his old, battered, rattling piano (it still had all its keys, and nearly as many strings), and there he would stand with a wooden yard-measure in his mouth, up which, as over a drawbridge, the notes climbed to him from the soundboard, then through the portcullis of his teeth, finally arriving at his soul by way of the Eustachian tube and the drum of the ear. He held this stork's-beak of a yard-measure between his teeth as described in order to magnify the inaudible pianissimo of his piano into a fortissimo at its upper end. However, humour looks paler when reflected in narrative than in the vividness of reality. That portion of earth's surface on which these two stood was riven into two distinct islets by these continual tremblings of the soil, and these islets kept drifting steadily further and further apart. And ere long there came a serious shock of earthquake.