that the innocent man is safe. The procession, however, approaches. The condemned man speaks from below to his daughter in the balcony. He declares his innocence. Now good _Vidocq_, to the rescue. Display all your arts, convict the guilty, disguised Marquis, and save the estimable _Lebrun_! But _Vidocq_ looks on impassive, a dull thud is heard and the head of the innocent rolls into the basket. Immediately afterwards _Yvrier_ staggers in. Too late, he says, he has been convinced of _Lebrun's_ innocence. At the last moment _Lebrun_ looked at him with eyes in which there was no trace of guilt. That last look did it, and now _Yvrier_ in a passion of repentance offers himself to help _Vidocq_, even in the most subordinate capacity, to track down the guilty, and to remove the stain from _Lebrun's_ name. I pass over the padding, during which _Vidocq_ appears, for no earthly reason, in numerous disguises, and come to the last scene. _Roland_ has all but killed _George Mazerolles_ in a duel, he has murdered _Sabine_, who, before dying, rounds on him, and he is now, by a strange conjunction of circumstances, in the very room in which he murdered _Madame Mazerolles_. Thither also comes everybody else. _Vidocq_, who is tracking _Roland_, discovers, through a paper belonging to the late _Madame Mazerolles_, that _Roland_, her murderer, was her son, not her step-son, and that he, _Vidocq_, is the father of _Roland_. In his youth _Vidocq_ had been a soldier. Somewhere he had met _Madame Mazerolles_. "_Nous nous sommes aimés entre deux batailles, entre deux victoires_," and _Roland_ was the fruit of their love. Horror of horrors! What is he to do? First he tells _Roland_ that he killed, not his step-mother, but his mother. At this awful intelligence, _Roland_ faints in an armchair for precisely ten seconds. Recovering himself, he is fain to escape. _Vidocq_, all his fatherly instincts aroused, says he shall. The weak _Yvrier_ consents, when suddenly, from behind a curtain, appears _Hélène Lebrun_ in black. The murderer of her father must not escape, she declares, whereupon the great detective, vowing that his son shall never be food for the guillotine, shoots him dead with a toy pistol in the region of the left waistcoat pocket. Tableau! Curtain! There, _Mr. Punch_, you have the French _Sherlock_ on the stage. A wonderful man, is he not? Yours, as always, A VAGRANT. * * * * * ON THE WAR IN THE EAST. (_By a Western Wonderer._)