confined in a dungeon, you will have neither protection nor defence."

Beaumarchais' reply was:

"I fly! I save myself! I will perish rather. Do not try to persuade me, my friends; provide a carriage for me with six mules by four o'clock to-morrow morning, and I will go to Aranjuez."

"I then shut myself up. I was nearly mad; my heart was in a vice; nothing could calm my agitation. I threw myself into a chair, where I remained two hours, incapable of forming an idea or a resolution."

In a state of positive intoxication he performed the twelve hours' journey to Aranjuéz. He rushed into the presence of the French ambassador, who told him that Clavico and his powerful friends had acted with such consummate art that he could do nothing for him except retard his arrest for a few hours. Beaumarchais left the ambassador more desperate than ever. He then rushed to a personal friend of the king's, who listened to his story with interest and sympathy. This gentleman introduced Beaumarchais to the cabinet of the king, to whom he read the history of the whole affair. The king instantly ordered the disgrace and dismissal of Clavico from all his posts. Then the wretched Clavico wrote to Beaumarchais for pity and assistance. And our fiery, good-hearted friend was fool enough to plead for the villain; but, thanks to the better sense of those who knew the facts of the case, he pleaded in vain.

Why are we all so in love with men like Beaumarchais ?

I think because of the interest they take in humanity. Careful, prudent, painstaking, exemplary persons may be very laudable, very respectable; but although they may gain our approval, they never gain our love. While our erratic, sparkling, loving, quarrelling, disreputable Beaumarchais, Fielding, Mirabeau, Sheridan, Molière, Burns, live in our hearts, and their very names make our eyes sparkle with delight. When it is a question of doing a generous action, they don't stop to count the cost. They are not always thinking of the opinion of Mrs. Grundy. The one thing needful with them is not a big balance at the bankers; they would not see a man they call friend go to ruin for £50 when they could easily spare £500. In short, our dear scapegraces, with all their faults and shortcomings, can love some things and some persons even more than themselves. And we foolish people who love them are not such egregious idiots as some very respectable and cold-blooded people suppose.

TEN TO ONE ON THE "SCREW."

BY PHILIP GASKELL,

AUTHOR OF "THE SENIOR MAJOR."

"Do means

you think he means to put us up? I'll go, I think, if he does, for I'm too hard up just now to stand being a week at an inn on my own hook."

The speaker is a young officer in the uniform of the Chalkshire Rifles. He has rather a vapid expression of countenance, but might, save for the visible effects of too early dissipation, be described as good-looking. His name is Grimshaw, and his remark calls forth a roar of laughter from two brother-officers who happen to be present. In the barrack-room appertaining to the oldest of the party, the three young fellows are, on one hot July night, "killing the enemy," to wit, the mighty "reaper" who by this playful pseudonym is by these frolicsome spirits familiarly spoken of.

"Put us up!" repeats Jemmy Fancourt with a broad grin on his cheery face; "I like that. Fancy your having been three months in the Chalkshires without having found out that Bill de Beevor was never known to give anything for nothing. He takes deuced good care, as any one can see by his letter, that there shall be no misunderstanding in the matter of putting up. Cracks up the Saumon Inn' no end, as having first-rate grub, and that kind of thing. Now, I really wonder," continued Fancourt thoughtfully, "what put it into old Bill's head to write to you fellows about these Morlaix races?"

"Thinks it would be a jolly lark between returns," suggested Tom Grimshaw, as he blew towards the ceiling a light smoke from his cigar.

"Has an idea, perhaps, that we shall like to see the country," surmised an evidently "home-keeping" youth, whose "homely wits" rendered him the victim of many a good-humoured shower of chaff.

"Wishes to improve your mind, eh, Talmash? Zeal for the service," laughed Fancourt. "I'll just tell you boys now what it is, and then you can't say afterwards that you haven't been forewarned. De Beevor is just the most knowing card in England, and if he doesn't run you in for something considerable I'm a Dutchman. He is, as we all know, about the best gentleman rider going

At

"Oh! I'm not afraid of being done," put in, with the proverbial rashness of youth, Second Lieutenant Tom Grimshaw. which boast there was another burst of hilarity, it being in the regiment an universally accepted fact that if there existed a chap who was safe to be taken in, that chap was Thomas Grimshaw.

Lord de Beevor, for such was the real style and title of the exrifleman on whom had been bestowed by irreverent youngsters the sobriquet of Bill, was the grandson of a very high and puissant marquis indeed; but pending the said Bill's elevation to rank and honours, he was, it must be owned, rather a low little personage, his only claims to distinction being based upon his skill as a steeplechase rider, and his excellence as a rifle shot. As a consequence of these merits, and also, it is to be feared, owing to a certain British weakness for a "lord," from which some of the Chalkshire Rifles were not wholly exempt, many of the men who had known him in the corps were rather proud of the fact that he had belonged to it. A serious quarrel with Lord de Beevor and his grandfather, whose son and heir had died suddenly a year before, had resulted in the migration, pro tem., of the younger man to the then cheap, and not greatly visited by tourists, locality of Lower Brittany. There, in an old Carlist château, partly occupied by an ex-English lawyer of indifferent repute, and his good-looking, underbred wife, the young scion of aristocracy, who was not, to borrow a French term, "very well viewed" by the aborigines of the country, roughed it on ten pounds a week, paid every Saturday to his order. On that sum, however, he contrived to keep a couple of nags and a small but useful pack of hounds, for in those days there was no lack of wild boar in the woods; and it was with the prospect of a boar-hunt, added to the excitement of a steeplechase, that Bill de Beevor had contrived to lure to the French Peninsula the two young fellows of whom, by the aliases of Grimshaw and Talmash, I have already written.

It was a long journey to Quimperlé, the town whither they were bound, and more than once as they jogged slowly along the Landes country, the travellers, on whom the picturesque aspects of the route were clearly thrown away, reproached themselves in no measured terms for the folly of which they had been guilty. It was late in the evening when, tired and hungry, they reached the "Hôtel du Saumon," an unassuming little hostelry standing on the shore of the Quimperlé river-a stream which, owing to the neglect by the adjacent landlords of their piscatorial rights, affords but little sport to lovers of the "gentle art." Over both the feelings and the language, given vent to by the aggrieved Englishmen when the best food which the inn could produce was set before them, it behoves us not to dwell. They were neither of them quite new to foreign parts, and to the every-day treatment which a well-to-do traveller in a Paris hotel is safe to meet

with; but if they had seen visions and dreamt dreams of such prefatory luxuries as a dainty pistolet, snow-white in its interior, and of thin pats of delicate butter reposing in a rampart of ice, they were doomed to signal disappointment. The loaf, three feet long at the very least, was flung upon the long, but for the nonce empty table d'hôte, by a red-faced Breton peasant-girl, underneath whose sonsy arm it had been reposing, and it certainly needed the sauce of hunger to induce the visitors to partake either of its half-sour and wholly whitey-brown component parts, or of the bifteck aux pommes de terre which was eventually set before them. The vin du pays was pronounced execrable, nor was the cider, on which the Breton peasant rarely misses an opportunity of endimanchéing himself, declared to be better tipple. Happily, however, the sufferers having youth and good health on their side contrived not only to live through these inflictions, but to be tolerably "fit" for the boar-hunt, at which (to them) novel species of sport they fully expected to distinguish themselves. Immediately therefore, after an early breakfast, they started with their respective munitions of war in a country carriole drawn by a sturdy Pontalec stallion for Château Keratry.

On the road-a distance of some five miles--to that retired residence they took note, much to their amusement, of numerous passing horsemen, on their way, like themselves, to "la chasse." The costumes of these "noble gentlemen sportsmen" were freely commented on by the Englishmen, not only en route, but on arriving at the château.

"By Jove! did you ever see such guys?" exclaimed Talmash. "Look at that fellow in the pea-green coat and hunting horn!"

"And that chap coming on, with his wooden buttons as big as dollars, and some kind of beast or bird on every one of them! Such seats, too, as they have! I wonder we haven't seen a cropper yet, but we shall, I bet, before the day's done."

Their reception by the self-exiled little English lord was very cordial as to words, and as he introduced them to a few of the French sportsmen, he contrived to whisper in the Englishmen's ears that they, the curiously got-up riders, were not fellows to be despised.

"They are counts and marquises, every man jack of them," he said; "old Carlist families. Blue blood, don't you know? The mayor of the commune wouldn't have allowed of this boar-battue but for them. The peasants are always getting up a concurrence to shoot down the boars on the plea that they are ravaging the crops, but it's the noblesse really who set it going."

After this explanation, the entire party, amounting to about forty gentlemen, made their way to the woods, whence from that moment there proceeded a mighty sound of shouting, and of the fanfares of cors de chasse. For hours at a stretch were they at it, hoping at every moment to hear from amongst the brushwood

covert the rush of their expected prey, but, ay, di mi! the brute, of whom Shakespeare wrote that

"On his bow-back he hath a battle-set

Of bristly pikes that ever threat his foes,"

did not on that occasion condescend to put in an appearance, the only victim to the sportsmen's "bows and spears" being a harmless squirrel which Tom Grimshaw, with the purpose of unloading his gun, took aim at, and incontinently, as a trophy of the day's sport, bagged. On the following morning our riflemen, accompanied by their quondam brother-officer, set off" a day's journey through the wilderness "-to Quimperlé. Their talk on the way ran chiefly on equine subjects, and on their arrival, the first object of interest, to Lord de Peevor especially, was the Lady Alicia, a weedy thoroughbred mare, bred by its owner, and which was safe to win the 1,000 francs prize at the forthcoming Quimperlé steeplechase.

The great day-great, that is to say, for the poor Armoricain, in whose eyes the sum of forty pounds is a synonym for wealth— dawned bright and clear. The time fixed for the all-important event was 2 p.m., and previous to that hour the young English officers were enabled to form an opinion, not alone of the nags which had entered for the race, but of the jockeys by whom they were to be ridden. The former, five in number, were heavy, country-bred stallions, whilst their riders were stalwart Breton peasants clad in the costume of the department, to wit, an embroidered velveteen jacket and loose bragues, id est, puffed out breeches. Their long hair fell over their shoulders; on their heads were broad-brimmed felt hats, whilst their feet were shod with sabots, anglicé, wooden shoes. The contrast between these stolid countrymen and Lord de Beevor, as the latter, faultlessly got up in his racing colours-green and purple-stood with his friends near the weighing-stand, was so strongly marked that Fred Talmash was seized with an involuntary impulse to say:

"Well, by Jove! this is rot, and no mistake. What a farce this weighing is, and what chance have these poor devils against your English thoroughbred?

"None whatever," was "Bill's" cool reply; "but they, as well as their backers, hold a different opinion. Obstinacy and conceit are such marked features in the Breton character that half these fellows with handles to their names are convinced that their breed of horses is the best in the world. The course is a long one, and they are ready to lay long odds against Lady Alicia's staying powers. They are arrant fools about horseflesh, and you can run them in for a good pile of naps, if you take my advice." "Thank you," rejoined Fred drily, "but it doesn't exactly suit my look to bet on a certainty."

A shrug of the shoulders was Lord de Beevor's only answer