The last boy we saw balanced was worthy of the chin that sustained him. The mountebank to be sure was a miracle, and could have balanced anything. If the books of the Bank of England were to get into disorder, every sum confused, and every figure out of its place--he could balance them. But the boy was at least two miracles rolled into one--a more than Siamese prodigy--a boy, and yet an ass too. He looked more like one than the reality, his predecessor. He evidently felt the past importance of his elevation, high above his compeers. He seemed quite conscious that every inhabitant, not of _that_ simply, but of the _next_ parish, was gazing at him in profound amazement. He turned no glance, whether of contempt or benignant pity, on the open eyes and mouths around, but looked unutterable things at the knocker of a door opposite. "So stands the statue that enchants the world!" This, however, was only at the commencement of the performance, while the spectators were being coaxed to contribute, and while several among them, not knowing exactly what they were doing, were giving a half-penny. But when the ladder was deliberately hoisted up, and fixed on the chin, then came the utter hopelessness of presenting a true resemblance of the ass's face--the boy's we mean;--of the conscious pride in its own blankness, of its self-complacency, tinged with a slight touch of fear, amounting only to a pleasurable excitement! He was a boy picked out of the crowd around,--yet he was matchless. You saw at once that he was not _employed_ by the mountebank--that he was not _paid_ for being balanced. There was something in his look that distinguished him at a glance from the hired professor. It might be supposed that, the boy not being hired, there would be a little difficulty in procuring a substitute for the ass: not so; only blow a trumpet or beat a drum in the street, and you are surrounded in less than no time with able and willing volunteers. This boy entered into the soul of the ass's part; he did not hug, and hang on the ladder mechanically, or like one who had done the same thing a dozen times before, that very day. There was the freshness of the young aspiration, the delicious novelty of the first grand step in life--in the attempt. It was young Ambition (as Brutus says) just mounting his ladder. He was animated by the glorious intoxication of getting up in the world. He looked direct forward; not at, but through, the brick wall opposite, into futurity. If one of his schoolfellows had called out, "Master's a coming;" or, "Here's your father with the cartwhip;" or, "Bill, I'm blessed if here arn't the woman what we stole the apples on;"--no, even these notes of alarm would have failed to disturb his equanimity--or his equilibrium. "Have a slice o' cold pudden, Bill?" might have communicated perhaps to some part of his frame a momentary touch of human weakness--we can't say positively--boys are but men;--but nothing short of such an