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eloquent note, was to have your revenge for the contempt with which you were treated by her in the first instance."

"What would you have me do then?" enquired Fivebars, who submitted himself implicitly in all these matters to the superior experience of Tracy.

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Why, cut her dead, and laugh in her face the first time you meet her in the street, to be sure," answered Bob, "and that will teach her to behave herself better on the next occasion."

The simple Mr. Fivebars obeyed Tracy's instructions, and Tracy himself had in the meantime taken good care to avail himself of the useful information thus conveyed to him by his catspaw, the confiding and unsuspicious Mr. Fivebars.

We do not mean to say that the whole of this story, as we have here given it, was told by Fivebars to his visitors, Boivin and Lord Fletcher, for of course he was unacquainted with the treachery which his kind friend Tracy had exhibited towards him; but we have told the story at length, in hopes that its moral may do some little good, if the reading of it may hereafter prevent any man from giving up in despair that which only requires a little knowledge of women and a little perseverance to secure its attain

ment; or, on the other hand, restrain even one weak woman from placing confidence in the false professions and lying protestations of that arch-deceiver man!

Women are accused by the stronger sex of insincerity and deception; they are reproached for dissimulation and cheating; are called heartless hypocrites, and faithless flirts, and designing traitresses: and let us ask who is to blame, even if they be so? Whose fault is it that their confiding and credulous bosoms are first taught suspicion and distrust, but that of men who awake that suspicion, and merit that distrust by deceiving them? And if, when they are once made aware, by painful experience, of the fraud and falsity of others, they mask themselves afterwards in lies; if they too have recourse to the shield of concealment, and arm themselves with the weapons of deception, are they not in some measure justified for this, by the necessity of coming on equal terms into the field? Of sincerity there is little enough in the world, God knows! but of what little there is, nineteen parts out of twenty lie on the side of

woman.

CHAPTER III.

WE shall be accused of making endless and unnecessary digressions; and, indeed, the present chapter and the preceding one are far from being an essential part, or connecting link in our general history. They are devoted to the sketches of two characters, Mr. Earthstopper Brush Fivebars, and Mr. Robert Tracy, who will not, we fear, possess any great interest for the generality of our readers; nevertheless, as they are, we believe, 'tolerably faithful copies of the manner in which many young Englishmen spend their time in Paris, after leaving their regiments, quitting the university, or coming into their fortunes, we have ventured to let them stand even as they were written, in the same way as two detached family portraits may occasionally be seen hanging by themselves apart in the midst of a gallery devoted to historical paintings.

As Tracy had been the cotemporary of Lord Fletcher's brother at college, and had been introduced to him the preceding evening by Fivebars as his most intimate friend, he was naturally one of the persons to whose lodging the young nobleman conducted his companion, Louis Boivin, in his vain attempt to cure him of his melancholy, by amusing his mind. We have seen enough of Bob Tracy, during his college career, to perceive that he was not a person very likely to make both ends meet, except in the way of " brulant la chandelle aux deux bouts," even had he possessed twenty thousand per annum. He still contrived to spend a great deal more than his income, and having added the propensity of gambling to his other habits of expenditure, since coming to Paris, he became more and more involved in pecuniary difficulties every day. He always had been given to the god of the grape, and being led by his feverish state of mind to drink still deeper than usual, he had rapidly lost his good looks; for though he had come originally to Paris only to pass a fortnight, he had prolonged the time indefinitely beyond that period, on account of his utter inability to pay the nume

rous debts, which must nevertheless be discharged before leaving the French capital. Not contented, like Shallow, with "hearing the chimes at midnight, a little too often," he frequently extended his potations till he heard the birds chirp in the morning, and his only chance of ever seeing the sun rise, was by sitting up all night over the bottle. The principal difference between him and Fivebars, independently of the disparity of their talents, was, that Fivebars was rich, and Tracy was poor; but then Fivebars would never have known how to spend his money, if he had not been schooled by Tracy. The luxury of a clean pair of kid gloves every time of smoking a cigar, was unknown to Fivebars, till Tracy taught him.

Tracy said, that his own greatest misfortune was to possess gentlemanly tastes, to have contracted gentlemanly habits and ideas, and to have always kept company with gentlemen. A gentleman has been defined to be a person who has no ostensible means of getting a livelihood, and in such sense Tracy's claim to the title was indisputable. He considered that there was no intervening medium between the character and the expenditure of a gentleman of three thousand a

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