class="toc">Merchandise in the Temple.

Father Joliet.

The Two Chickens.

Love Left Alone.

"Fond of Chicken."

The Wife.

The Lone Crusade.

Tender Charity.

Necessity Knowing Law.

The Ferry.

Jove's Thunder.

School.

On With the Dance!

Endymion.

How the Modern Dog Treats Lazarus.

The Laughing Lackey.

The Present.

The Convalescent.

The Divided Burden.

Share My Cup.

Breaking Stones.

Sickness and Courtship.

The Wagon.

Dinner-time!

Fidelity.

A Little Visitor.

Francine.

"Don't Wring My Heart!"

View of Taufers Valley.

Schloss Taufers.

Happy Souls in Paradise.

Crossing the Torrent.

THE NEW HYPERION.

FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

II.—THE TWO CHICKENS.

THE FLOWERS OF WAR.

"Thou art no less a man because thou wearest no hauberk nor mail sark, and goest not on horseback after foolish adventures."

So I said, reassuring myself, thirty years ago, when, as Paul Flemming the Blond, I was meditating the courageous change of cutting off my soap-locks, burning my edition of Bulwer and giving my satin stocks to my shoemaker: I mean, when I was growing up—or, in the more beauteous language of that day, when Flemming was passing into the age of bronze, and the flowers of Paradise were turning to a sword in his hands.

Well, I say it again, and I say it with boldness, you can wear a tin botany-box as bravely as a hauberk, and foolish adventures can be pursued equally well on foot.

Stout, grizzled and short winded, I am just as nimble as ever in the pretty exercise of running down an illusion. Yet I must confess, as I passed the abattoirs of La Villette, whence blue-smocked butcher-boys were hauling loads of dirty sheepskins, I could not but compare myself to the honest man mentioned in one of Sardou's comedies: "The good soul escaped out of a novel of Paul de Kock's, lost in the throng on the Boulevard Malesherbes, and asking the way to the woods of Romainville."