“Two Clowns” is a sketch of a different type--less aggressively moral, its conclusion more subtly enforced, and possessing more of the narrative quality of the tale. It is a dual sketch--a sketch of contrasts. We are standing before the tent of some strolling acrobats. To lure the bystanders to the performance a clown receives the rain of pretended buffets from the hands of the ring-master--quite in the manner we all know. Now an aged crone among the onlookers is seen to be weeping. On being questioned she wails out the story that she has recognized in this wretched clown her only son. Having robbed his master, he had been sent away to sea, the father had died, and now after having heard nothing of the scapegrace for years she discovers in the buffeted clown her only child. But suddenly the old woman realizes that she is telling the intimate sorrows of her heart to the gaping crowd, and with gesture abrupt and imperious she pushes aside her listeners and disappears in the night. The second scene is in the Chamber of Deputies, at a sensational sitting. An orator mounts the tribune to denounce some proposed spoliation of the people. With all the arts of the demagogue--wonderfully delineated--he begins his string of ready-made phrases. He postures, he mouths, he prophesies, he looses the dogs of war, “he even risks a bit of poetry, flourishes old metaphors which were worn-out in the time of Cicero,” and amidst mingled bravos and grumbles “soars like a goose,” and ends. As we leave the Chamber we see an elderly woman of the _bourgeoisie_. It is the mother of the political mountebank--she is radiant and content. “The Sabots of Little Wolff” is a typical tale, done in the manner of a legend. Never was the spirit of childhood--human and divine--more exquisitely set forth than in this wonderfully wrought story. How _can_ it be told in other, or fewer, words than those simple and eloquent sentences of François Coppée! “Once upon a time--it was so long ago that the whole world has forgotten the date--in a city in the north of Europe--whose name is so difficult to pronounce that no one remembers it--once upon a time there was a little boy of seven, named Wolff. He was an orphan in charge of an old aunt who was hard and avaricious, who embraced him only on New Year’s Day, and who breathed a sigh of regret every time she gave him a porringer of soup. “But the poor little fellow was naturally so good that he loved the old woman all the same, though she frightened him greatly, and he could never without trembling see the huge wart, ornamented with four gray hairs, which she had on the end of her nose.”