neglects to eat the right ones, must have some
moral obliquity, some deformity of sense,
some hump in his heart. There is engraven
ineffaceably on my mind the newspaper
details of a famous and cruel murder, whose
date has utterly escaped my memory. In
the report, I remember reading that the
murderer and his victim — a woman — dined
together on the Christmas Day preceding the
murder off boiled scrag of mutton and
turnips. I remember the heads of my family
shaking their heads gravely when that fact
was made public. No good, you see, could
come of such a dinner.

With this strong feeling on the subject of
Christmas in its connection with the pudding,
it may easily be understood how the two
Christmas disasters I am about to narrate
made a strong and lasting impression on my
mind, and why I reckon them as of decided
importance among the griefs of which I have
had my share.

Disaster number one, took place in a
foreign clime, in the city of Paris, full
twenty years ago. Yes ; it must be twenty,
correlative circumstances tell me so ; yet I
am not twice twenty years of age yet ; and
it appears to me that I can remember full
fifty Christmas dinners preceding the one on
which the disaster took place. And there
must have been two repasts again preceding
those : one composed of pap, the other of
chopped meat and bread crumbs. Perhaps
the dinners of my nonage — (childhood is so
prompt to exaggerate) — counted double :
perhaps I regaled sometimes in my dreams,
or dined with the fairies, or played at
pudding with my brothers and sisters. At all
events twenty years ago I was a very little
stranded Englishman, in a strange land,
among three hundred strange boys, in a great
public school ; that it was my first Christmas
abroad, and that I was far from being familiar
with the French language. The masters
used me well enough, and the big boys did
not beat me (the ennobling system of fagging
is happily quite unknown in French schools),
but I was very lonely, and friendless, and
miserable. I did not know anything of the
French games, I was a protestant, and could
never divest myself of an uneasy notion that
the corpulent ecclesiastic in the purple
soutane, who came to prepare the boys for their
first communion, looked upon me as an
irredeemable brand for the burn— a living
sample of those little wooden wheels, towed
and turpentined, used for lighting fires, and
known, I believe, as blazers — and that he
warned the other collegians to be chary in
their companionship with me, for their souls'
health. Indeed, Gueret, aged twelve, who
was the greatest reprobate in the establishment,
was the nephew of a bishop, and had
once been convicted of stealing a peg-top,
told me privately, on more than one occasion,
that I could not be saved. I had a brother
in Paris — many years older than I — who
was studying at the Conservatoire ; but
he was so tall, had come to see me so
seldom, had such a gruff voice, and wore
such a fluffy white hat, that I was frightened
of him, and called him Monsieur
Fréderic. Once, and once only, on the next
holiday to the Jardin des Plantes (pocket-
money running rather short), I was emboldened,
I may say, incited, by some of my
schoolfellows who had boundless notions of
my brother's wealth, to write to him,
soliciting the loan of a ten sous piece. I suffered
infinite agony of mind and consciousness of
guilt till the answer arrived. It came at last
in the shape of a bonny, new, two franc
piece. I remember keeping it for a whole
day and a half in an old morocco jewel-case,
building all sorts of castles in the air as to
the manner in which it was to be spent. But
the holiday came, and the big boys undertook
to lay my money out for me, to the best
advantage. They laid it out to such advantage
that, alas ! they spent it all, and I solemnly
declare no part of the feast came to my
share, save a brown loaf, a stick of barley-
sugar, and a cup of iced liquorice water, or
coco.

I had a sister, at school in the convent of the
Sacred Heart. I went to see her when I could
get an exeat — about once in three weeks ; and
I may reckon among the adventures of my
life that I have eaten plum-cake in a convent
parlour, and have sate on the knee of a live
abbess. But I had no other English friends
or connections — my mother was far away—
and I was homesick, and my small heart was
weary. The boys without, as I have said,
positively illtreating me, were apt to dance
round me, to call me derisive epithets,—
Rosbif, Pommedeterre, and the like ;—
they worried me dreadfully about a small
tooth comb I used, and the like of which, I
suppose, had never been in France before.
There were some, who, though young, were
politicians, and whose bitter taunts caused
me often to bedew my pillow with tears for
the involuntary share I had had in the
Peninsular war, and the unconscious yet unpardonable
degree in which I had been accessory to
the illtreatment of Napoléon Bonaparte by
Sir Hudson Lowe.

When Christmas came, and uprose Batten.
Blessed be Batten evermore, and may the
way of the world be soft to his feet, now,
wherever he may be. Batten was a pharmacien
anglais, — he kept an English chemist's
shop in the Rue du Faubourg Saint Honoré,
nearly opposite the British embassy. He was
a meek, mild, fair little man, who earned, I
am afraid, but a scanty livelihood in purveying
those much-prized blue-pills, and those
indispensable black doses which are, to the British
aristocracy and gentry travelling abroad as the