“Enough!” said the general. “Let the clown go, he will think better 62 of it.” “I do not think twice of things,” replied Lucas, saluting as he went out. Lucia ran after him into the anteroom, caught his arm, and, pressing it against her bosom, cried in a voice of passionate and tender entreaty: “Lucas! my brother! for God’s sake stay! The general has promised me that he will do all he can for you; and he can do a great deal.” “The sack is not big enough to hold both honor and profit,” responded Lucas, hurling his sister from him with all the loftiness of a proud nature and the brute force of an angry churl. Lucia fell overwhelmed upon the nearest chair, and her brother went his way to the quarters with clinched fists and lips compressed--pale with lividness that ire stamps upon the faces of children of the south. Ire was suffocating him; for he could neither express it nor follow its vengeful impulses, which would not have been satisfied short of the commission of a crime; and of this he was incapable. But, oh! for a war. The private soldier would have given in it a hundred lives if he had had them for a pair of epaulets that would lift him to the rank required, in order to enable him to demand satisfaction of the villain who, after having seduced his sister, had insulted him so impudently--epaulets that he would have thrown away the next hour, like flattened orange skins; for Lucas was not aspiring; neither fortune nor show attracted him. He clung to his condition, loved the labors of the field; was attached to his town and its customs, and would not have renounced the things that suited his taste, and in which he excelled, for the sake of hoisting himself upon a platform where he must always have been an unwelcome stranger and intruder. The very words were antipathetic to his innate devotion, to his country, his province, the place where he was born, his lares, and his class.--And the effort of the age is to destroy this beautiful instinct of the heart, by continually saying to the poor, “Rise, rise! the summit is your goal: the heights are common to all,” thus infusing a vain arrogance into the wholesome minds of those who are so worthy and respectable in the place they occupy. CONCLUDED IN OUR NEXT. [2] From 10_d._ to 10½_d._ sterling.