grievous wrong. Let me do away with the possibility of this most mistaken notion, at once and for ever, by the recital of an event which, although it does not come within the scope of the present narrative, nearly concerns one of its most important characters.

After the peace in 1815, there were more officers—English and French—killed in single combat in Paris than in any one of the most bloody battles of the late war. This desire to exterminate individual Englishmen extended over the whole of France. A certain gentleman of my acquaintance, then a very young man, chanced to be passing through a town in Normandy, where an assemblage was collected outside the office of the mayor. This arose from the very uncommon circumstance that that functionary had been appealed to by a post-captain in the English navy to punish a bullying Frenchman, who had striven to fasten a quarrel upon him, although entirely unprovoked on his part. Now-a-days, the captain would have been held to have behaved rightly enough, perhaps, but in those fire-eating times an honest man's life was at the mercy of every worthless ruffian who chose to run an equal risk with him from powder and bullet. The decision, wonderful to relate, was given by the mayor against his compatriot, and the crowd were correspondingly enraged. My friend, whose nationality was apparent, was hustled and ill-treated, and one person, well-dressed, and evidently of good position, knocked his hat off, observing at the same time: "You will complain of me to the mayor for that."

"Certainly not," returned the young Englishman quietly, picking his hat up, all broken and muddy, from the trampled ground: "I shall treat you very differently."

"You will fight, will you? Come—I challenge you. Let us fight to-morrow morning," exclaimed the bully, who was, as it turned out, a notorious provincial duellist.

"Not to-morrow, but now," rejoined my friend; "I have no time to wait here, for I must be in Paris on Tuesday."

"Then it will be in Père la Chaise," responded the other brutally.

There was no difficulty in procuring seconds, which were even more plentiful in those parts than principals, and the whole party immediately left the town for a wood outside its suburbs. The choice of weapons of course lay with the Englishman.

"Which do you prefer," asked the Frenchman who acted as his friend upon the occasion—"the pistol or the sword?"

"I have never fired 

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