landing a barbel of three or four pounds weight. Who could have guessed that under this calm and self-contained exterior, so philosophical, so far removed from all frivolity, lurked one imperious and extravagant passion, in utter contradiction to the apparent character, moral and physical, of this animal so serious and so thoughtful that one would have almost called him sad? What, you say, has this admirable Zamore then some hidden vice? No. Was he a thief, a libertine? No. Had he a taste for brandy-cherries? No. Did he bite? Ten thousand times, no! Zamore’s passion was for dancing. In him, a true Terpsichorean artist was lost to the world. This vocation was discovered in the following manner. One day there appeared in the public square at Passy a grayish ass, one of those luckless donkeys belonging to a juggler, which Decamps and Fouquet have so successfully painted. Two panniers, balanced across his galled back, held a troop of trained dogs, costumed according to sex as marquises, troubadours, Turks, Swiss shepherds, and queens of Golconda. The show-man lifted out the dogs, cracked his whip, and instantly all the actors exchanged the horizontal position for the perpendicular, and transformed themselves from quadrupeds into bipeds. A fife and a tambourine sounded, and the ballet began. Zamore, who was strolling gravely past, stopped short, astonished at the spectacle. These gayly caparisoned dogs, with laced seams and clinking ornaments, plumed hats and turbans on their heads, and such an odd resemblance to men and women, seemed to him supernatural beings. Their measured steps, their courtesies, their _pirouettes_ enchanted but did not discourage him. Like Correggio before the pictures of Raphael, he cried in the canine language, “Anch’io son pittore,” “I also am a painter,” and, seized with noble emulation as the troop defiled before him in a ladies’ chain, he raised himself on his hind legs which visibly shook, and, to the vociferous delight of the bystanders, made a movement to join them. But the show-man was not so much charmed as the bystanders. He gave Zamore a sharp cut of his whip and drove him from the circle, just as one might expel from the door of a theatre a spectator who, during the progress of the play, took it into his head to climb on to the stage and join in the ballet.