"Je me recommande à vous," was said to me the other day by an old gentleman dressed in very tattered garments, who was thus soliciting a "sou." The old man was a picture: his long gray hairs fell gracefully over his shoulders. Tall--he was so bent forward as to take with a becoming air the position in which he had placed himself. One hand was pressed to his heart, the other held his hat. His voice, soft and plaintive, did not want a certain dignity. In that very attitude, and in that very voice, a nobleman of the ancient "régime" might have solicited a pension from the Duc de Choiseul in the time of Louis XV. I confess that I was the more struck by the manner of the venerable suppliant, from the strong contrast which it formed with the demeanor of his countrymen in general: for it is rare, now-a-days, I acknowledge, to meet a Frenchman with the air which Lawrence Sterne was so enchanted with during the first month, and so wearied with at the expiration of the first year, which he spent in France. That look and gesture of the "petit marquis," that sort of studied elegance, which, at first affected by the court, became at last natural to the nation, exist no longer, except among two or three "grands seigneurs" in the Faubourg St. Germain, and as many beggars usually to be found on the Boulevards. To ask with grace, to beg with as little self-humility as possible, here perchance is the fundamental idea which led, in the two extremes of society, to the same results: but things vicious in their origin are sometimes agreeable in their practice.