“At one o’clock dancing recommenced with renewed vigour. The fête was at its height. Half an hour later strange rumours arose. It was whispered that the husband, in a transport of rage and jealousy, was searching everywhere for his missing wife. Some friends, with the intention, no doubt, of reassuring him, said she had danced constantly with her handsome, dashing cousin, and was seen to elope with him. “ ‘Ah! the false one!’ cried the poor, despairing husband; ‘I will be revenged!’ “I pitied his despair, and coaxed him away from the scene, at once so gay and so tragic. ‘You have sown,’ I said, ‘and you have reaped. It is now not a question of cursing life, but of bearing it.’ “We left Baden that night, and, contrary to my expectation, my pupil never recovered the humiliating shock his own folly had brought upon him, by ‘marrying in haste, and repenting at leisure.’ True to his weak nature, easily attracted by glitter and flare, he at last flung himself into a lamp at Strasbourg, and perished with a comforting {199} belief in the doctrine of transmigration of Buddha and Pythagoras. The fate of the runaway Dragon-fly is a warning to weak wives. She and her admirer were caught in the net of a princely bird, and pinned down on a board, in a museum, two days after their elopement. [Illustration] {200} THE MISFORTUNES OF A CROCODILE. [Illustration] You see in me, gentlemen, a very unfortunate animal. Under the circumstances, I think I am justified in maintaining that no reptile has the same reason to complain. Judge for yourselves! What do I ask? Simply to be left alone to eat, digest, sleep, and warm my thick coat in the sun. If other animals are foolish enough to display their restless activity, and wear themselves out, in order to earn a miserable living, that is their business, not mine. I await my prey quietly, in a manner becoming the descendant of the illustrious Crocodiles worshipped by the Egyptians. Faithful to my aristocratic origin, I detest anything more intellectual than a good dinner, and the full enjoyment of the senses. Why will men pester me with their schemes for the extension of my mud bank by warfare, or harass me with their brand new measures for pacific financial reform? My privacy is perpetually invaded; I have hardly an hour I can call my own. One bright summer morning my history began, like the first part of a novel, all perfume and roses, steeped in the social tranquillity which precedes the storms and heart-breakings of closing volumes.