36 Tales of the Dead. 



In the next place, the many strange stories that I have picked iijv,- and 

 the many odd adventures which I have witnessed, or in which I have 

 participated, have led me to contract a habit of settling every question, 

 how momentous soever, by the recital of a tale or scapegrace anecdote. 

 Manifold are the evil consequences resulting from this inveterate habit 

 of mine. I have lost my character for argument ; and yet time was when 

 I could handle a syllogism as dexterously as any casuist that ever per- 

 plexed a plain case. I am now, forsooth, known only by the appellation 

 of the novelist, or the traveller, or some other such significant epithet, 

 shrewdly indicative of a certain failing, to which, in the opinion of Fal- 

 staff, this world is much given. My most veracious histories are treated 

 as agreeable fictions, in which the moral is lost in the romance ; my most 

 pertinent anecdotes share the fate reserved of old for the revelations of 

 Priam's ill-fated daughter, who, as Virgil tells us, was doomed to pro- 

 phecy to a set of obdurate heathens that disbelieved her predictions and 

 laughed at her advice. I sometimes feel my gall rising at this wilful 

 neglect of the good things, at this obstinate blindness to the moral lessons 

 that, on a diligent search, might be found in my narratives ; but as I 

 am in the main a good-natured peripatetic, I invariably join in the laugh 

 against myself, satisfied to amuse if I cannot instruct. 



Though compelled to yield to the opinion of my friends I mean the 

 vagabond portion of society, whose fellowship I chiefly cultivate and 

 though forced in some measure to abandon my pretensions tological acumen, 

 my head forms a capacious storehouse for anecdotes of every sort ; for 

 an infinity of scraps, and odds, and ends, in the way of personal and 

 rambling adventure. By this means, whatever may be the subject started, 

 though I may not always be ready to attack it with the heavy artillery 

 of argument and reason, I can generally from the aforesaid arsenal bring 

 the small guns of illustration and anecdote to bear upon it directly or 

 indirectly. I particularly pride myself upon knowing when to make a 

 hit ; upon my dexterity in crushing the pretensions of a rival fabulist ; 

 upon a happy knack of snatching a good thing out of a voluble orator's 

 mouth, and making his story my own. I could for hours together make 

 a dead set at the most experienced proser, watching the first symptom 

 of exhaustion, and availing myself of an unlucky cough or hem to 

 seize upon the audience as my property for the rest of the evening. Com- 

 mend me to the Frenchman who, having for once in his life afforded an 

 opening to a phthisicky opponent by stopping to take breath in the 

 middle of a long argument, replied to a friend that expressed some sur- 

 prise at his unusual want of tact, " Attendez done ; s'il crache, il est 

 perdu." 



During the course of last autumn, that predilection for a rambling life, 

 which I have always cherished, and which I maintain to be proper and 

 natural to man, introduced me to a soiree in the north of France, where 

 I enjoyed the society of as motley a group as ever vagabond observer 

 noted in his chequered page. The evening was wet and gloomy ; the 

 very avant-courier of a winter's day. In a spacious antique saloon were 

 congregated an assemblage of quaint physiognomies that seemed as if 

 moulded from a variety of models ; while, with a gravity not usual to 

 our Gallic neighbours, the provincial beaux and belles glided along the 

 well- waxed oaken floor, or sat in rueful contemplation of the bleak-looking 

 fire-place, whose unkindled faggots reminded of the cheerful blaze that 

 had been, and whose blackness a poetic imagination might have fancied 



