clothes, so worn out, and patched and pieced, that the pawnbroker had refused to have anything to do with them. A stove, a saucepan, a damaged earthen stewpan, two or three cracked cups, scattered about on the floor, a bucket, a board to wash on, and a large stone pitcher, placed beneath the angle of the roof near the broken door, which the wind kept continually blowing to and fro, completed the whole of the family possessions. This picture of squalid misery and desolation was lighted up by the candle, whose flame, agitated by the cold northeasterly wind which found its way through the tiles on the roof, sometimes imparted a pale, unearthly light on the wretched scene, and then, playing on the heaps of diamonds and rubies lying beside the sleeping artisan, caused a thousand scintillating sparks to spring forth and dazzle the eye with their prismatic rays of brightness. Although the profoundest silence reigned around, seven out of the eight unfortunate dwellers in this attic were awake; and each, from the grandmother to the youngest child, watched the sleeping lapidary with intense emotion, as their only hope, their only resource, and, in their childlike selfishness, they murmured at seeing him thus inactive and relinquishing that labour which they well knew was all they had to depend on; but with different feelings of regret and uneasiness did the lookers-on observe the slumber of the toil-worn man. The mother trembled for her children's meal; the children thought but of themselves; while the idiot neither thought of nor cared for any one. All at once she sat upright in her wretched bed, crossed her long, bony arms, yellow and dry as box-wood, on her shrivelled bosom, and kept watching the candle with twinkling eyes; then, rising slowly and stealthily, she crept along, trailing after her her old ragged coverlet, which clung around her as though it had been her winding-sheet. She was above the middle height, and her hair being so closely shaven made her head appear disproportionately small; a sort of spasmodic movement kept up a constant trembling in her thick, pendulous under-lip, while her whole countenance offered the hideous model of ferocious stupidity. Slowly and cautiously the idiot approached the lapidary's work-table, like a child about to commit some forbidden act. When she reached the candle, she held her two trembling hands over the flame; and such was their skeleton-like condition, that the flickering light shone through them, imparting a pale, livid hue to her features. From her pallet Madeleine Morel watched every movement of the old woman, who, still warming herself over the candle, stooped her head, and with a silly kind of delight watched the sparkling of the diamonds and rubies, which lay glittering on the table. Wholly absorbed in the wondrous contemplation of such bright and beautiful things, the idiot allowed her hands to fall into the flame of the candle, nor did she seem to recollect where they