But my intention is not to talk politics. I only wish to prove that we have many more opportunities, were they rightly used, of securing honours than fall to the lot of highly gifted and cultured creatures. My master was a simple schoolmaster in the environs of Paris. He was a good teacher, and a thoroughly miserable character. We had this peculiarity in common, if we had our choice, we would have decided to live well and do nothing. This characteristic, common both to asses and men, is vulgarly called ambition, at the same time I think it is only the spontaneous growth of modern society. I myself had opened a class, and taught in a manner which excited my master’s jealousy, although he acknowledged himself struck by the results of my method. “Why is it,” he one day said to me, “that the children of men take so much longer to learn to read, write, and become useful members of society, than young donkeys do to learn how to earn a living? How is it that asses have so profited by all that their fathers knew before them, that their education is, so to speak, born in them? So it is, indeed, with every species of animal excepting the human. Why is man not born with his mind and faculties fully developed?” Although my master was quite ignorant of natural history, he {139} imagined that these questions in themselves were so thoroughly scientific and posing as to entitle him to a place under the Minister of Public Instruction, where he might extend his valuable reflections at the expense of the State. [Illustration] We entered Paris by the Fabourg St. Mareian. When we reached the elevated ground near the Barrier d’Italie, in full view of the metropolis, we each delivered an oration in our own way. “Tell me, O Sacred Shrine wherein the budget is cooked, when will the signature of some _parvenu_ professor obtain for me food, raiment, and shelter, the cross of the Legion of Honour, and a chair of no matter what, no matter where, &c.? {140} “Believe me, I should say so much good of every one that no harm could be breathed against me. “Tell me how shall I reach the Minister and convince him of my fitness to wear my country’s honours.” I followed my master’s eloquent appeal. “O charming Jardin des Plantes, where animals are so well fed, will you never open to me your stables of twenty feet square? your Swiss valleys thirty yards wide? Shall I ever be one of those happy animals who roll on the clover of the budget, or stalled beneath graceful trellis-work bearing the superscription, ‘An African donkey, presented by So-and-so, captain of a ship, &c.?’ ”