The Glove is worthy of entering into the legend of a fairy tale, and remaining there always, as the slipper has entered into the poetry even of fable, with the theme of /Cinderella/. An ancient King of France was indeed in love all his life with an unknown woman, only from having seen her Glove in the midst of a masked ball given to his court. Could it not easily be conceived according to the approximative aphorism, "Show me your Glove, I will tell you who you are." At the opera ball, in the surge of masks and of dominoes, in the midst of the comings and goings on that staircase so exalted, it needs but a Glove imprisoning a little hand to allure at once the passion of a man of delicacy--a long white Glove lovingly glued to a hand divinely small, a fine delicate wrist, and the exquisite roundness of the forearm. This is enough to transport a lover of the fair sex. The Glove appears not only in all festivals where grace and beauty preside; it is found in all the rudeness and clumsiness of its origin at the Poles, among the Norwegians, the Laps, and the Fins, who wear huge Gloves of wool in summer, and thick Gloves of reindeer skin, with the hair outside, in winter. Defended by these Gloves, they sometimes sally bravely from their huts, in spite of the cruel frosts, to kill the white bear and the seal, just as the dramatic engravings which illustrate our stories of voyages to the North Pole represent them to us. But methinks your eye is asking me in disquietude about two little bound books which I have in my reach. Reassure yourself, these are not recitals of tourists, which are for painting us the manners of the inhabitants of Karasjok or of the Lofoten Isles: I will read to you at once, without allowing you to languish any longer, their titles. Upon one of these works, see for yourself /Collection of the Best Riddles of the Time/, composed on divers serious and sprightly subjects by Colletet; on the other, /Collection of Riddles of the Time/, by the Abbé Cotin. You already divine that I intend to act no traitor's part towards you, and that I am going to read you some old charades in verse upon Gloves: The first riddle--/énigme/ has been masculine in French at least since the seventeenth century, in despite of its profound femininity--the first riddle, in obscure and ambiguous terms, indicates that the Glove, after having been the natural covering of a rustic animal, serves to-day as an artificial covering for an animal more refined: man! We're two or ten, and to a body wed, We once a thing of breathing life were over; Like it we lived, and now, although we're dead, Another life more excellent we cover. This quatrain riddle is by François Colletet, that poor poet up to his neck in mud. Listen now to Cotin--the Trissotin of Molière--in this singular sextain:--