He was lying as I have drawn him, one hand on his breast, the other falling towards the ground. There was an expression of perfect calm on the face, and no mark of blood to stain the side towards the light. On the other side, however, there was a great pool of black blood, and in it the pistol; it looked more like a toy than a weapon to take away the life of this vigorous young man. In his forehead, at the side, was a small black wound; Jack’s life had passed through it; it was little bigger than a mole. * * * * * ‘Regardez un peu,’ said the landlady; ‘messieurs, il m’a gâté trois matelas, et il me doit quarante quatre francs.’ [Illustration] This was all his epitaph: he had spoiled three mattresses, and owed the landlady four-and-forty francs. In the whole world there was not a soul to love him or lament him. We, his friends, were looking at his body more as an object of curiosity, watching it with a kind of interest with which one follows the fifth act of a tragedy, and leaving it with the same feeling with which one leaves the theatre when the play is over and the curtain is down. Beside Jack’s bed, on his little _table de nuit_, lay the remains of his last meal, and an open letter, which we read. It was from one of his suspicious acquaintances of former days, and ran thus:-- ‘Où es-tu, cher Jack? _why you not come and see me_--tu me dois de l’argent, entends tu?--un chapeau, une cachemire, _a box of the Play_. Viens demain soir, je t’attendrai _at eight o’clock_, Passage des Panoramas. _My Sir is at his country._--Adieu à demain. ‘_Samedi_.’ ‘FIFINE. I shuddered as I walked through this very Passage des Panoramas, in the evening. The girl was there, pacing to and fro, and looking in the countenance of every passer-by, to recognise Attwood. ‘ADIEU À DEMAIN!’--there was a dreadful meaning in the words, which the writer of them little knew. ‘Adieu à demain!’--the morrow was come, and the soul of the poor suicide was now in the presence of God. I dare not think of his fate; for, except in the fact of his poverty and desperation, was he worse than any of us, his companions, who had shared his debauches, and marched with him up to the very brink of the grave? There is but one more circumstance to relate regarding poor Jack--his burial; it was of a piece with his death. He was nailed into a paltry coffin and buried, at the expense of the arrondissement, in a nook of the burial-place beyond the Barrière de l’Étoile. They buried him at six o’clock, of a bitter winter’s morning, and it was with difficulty that an English clergyman could be found to read a service over his grave. The three men who have figured in this history acted as Jack’s mourners; and as the ceremony was to take place so early in the morning, these men sat up the night through, _and were almost drunk_ as they followed his coffin to its resting-place. MORAL