country. But I want to be rich. At the price of all the comforts which I have not had, I have saved a capital, the income of which will support us all. Eh, eh! That’s the power of the little penny put out to fatten!”     

       As she went to bed that night, Mme. Favoral felt more happy than she had done since her mother’s death. She almost forgave her husband his sordid parsimony, and the humiliations he had heaped upon her.     

       “Well, be it so,” she thought. “I shall have lived miserably, I shall have endured nameless sufferings; but my children shall       be rich, their life shall be easy and pleasant.”     

       The next day M. Favoral’s excitement had completely abated. Manifestly he regretted his confidences.     

       “You must not think on that account that you can waste and pillage every thing,” he declared rudely. “Besides, I have greatly exaggerated.”     

       And he started in search of a situation.     

       To find one was likely to be difficult. Times of revolution are not exactly propitious to industry. Whilst the parties discussed in the Chamber, there were on the street twenty thousand clerks, who, every morning as they rose, wondered where they would dine that day.     

       For want of any thing better, Vincent Favoral undertook to keep books in various places,—an hour here, an hour there, twice a week in one house, four times in another.     

       In this way he earned as much and more than he did at the factory; but the business did not suit him.     

       What he liked was the office from which one does not stir, the stove-heated atmosphere, the elbow-worn desk, the leather-cushioned chair, the black alpaca sleeves over the coat. The idea that he should on one and the same day have to do with five or six different houses, and be compelled to walk an hour, to go and work another hour at the other end of Paris, fairly irritated him. He found himself out of his reckoning, like a horse who has turned a mill for ten years; if he is made to trot straight before him.     

       So, one morning, he gave up the whole thing, swearing that he would rather remain idle until he could find a place suited to his 

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