'Ha! my pretty paper collar, I must turn you. You'll never die a heretic. By Jove! paper collars were a great invention: they emancipate the lord of creation from the thraldom of the washerwoman. Better to face the free sky than to pine in this stuffy cell. Your toilette is finished, Manus, my friend, and now to pass under the Caudine forks.' The Caudine forks was the term he applied to the passage leading by the _concierge's_ narrow office to the open street--a humiliating passage enough, it is made, to any man of proud spirit and slim purse by the voluble Parisian _concierge_, the warder of the entrance to the lodging-house. The _concierge_ is a perennial fountain of gossip, the demon of grasp personified, and is popularly supposed always to have a daughter at the Conservatory of Music. Watching his opportunity, crouched at the bottom of the dark stairs, O'Hara bolted at a mad rush through the hall, and never ceased running until he had gained the Boulevard St. Michel, after traversing the intervening Rue de l'Ecole de Médecine. He stopped a minute, laughed, tightened the belt which supported his trousers, cried in a light voice, 'Blockade safely run!' and resumed his way rapidly along the boulevard till he came to the quay, then turned to the right, past Notre Dame, until he reached the Pont d'Archevêche, whereat he stopped. The Morgue was near--gloomy receptacle of the unclaimed dead, sent to their God before their time by crime, starvation, or despair, or by some of the accidents which often-times cut short the span of the happiest human life. He looked at it with a desperate, desponding, forlorn look for a little time, and then broke out as if in sequence of some train of thought: 'No; it's no use thinking of it. I couldn't do it. If it weren't for the immortality of the soul, and that inconvenient religious training I've got! Now if I were a Pagan, I could freely end my woes in that silent river; but I'm a Christian, and must suffer them, and curse my kind.' A mournful yet affectionate whine at his feet attracted his attention. He looked down. A lank, ugly cur, of unassignable breed, but unmistakably currish--a rank, unmitigated cur, with melancholy visage and moist eyes--returned the look. 'Poor dog, you, too, have hunger in your face. The world has deserted you!' The dog whined again, and rubbed his thin sides familiarly and confidently against the bottom of O'Hara's trousers. 'Alas! friend, I am like yourself--a wretched, friendless dog. Your imploring looks are lost on me, though, Heaven knows, I would relieve you if I could. _Haud ignara mali miseris succurrere disco._ Faith! the gender is wrong there. My grammar is going with everything else. I suppose I should have said _ignarus_.' He faintly smiled at the notion.