Yet never has the present writer felt more abjectly crushed with a sense of incompetence than when posed by the difficulties of a "hagnostic" greengrocer, or of a dressmaker fresh from the perusal of "Erbert" Spencer.

No French, English, Italian or American gentleman would think he had in some way cleared his own character by sticking his sabre through some ridiculous greengrocer who had nothing in his hand but a cucumber.

But the Renan-France method is to write like this: "When we consider Jack's curious and even perilous heredity, which no doubt was derived from a female greengrocer and a profligate priest, we can easily understand how the ideas of heaven and a beanstalk came to be combined in his mind.

He is not a, "gatherer and disposer of other men's stuff," like some clerical greengrocers: what he says is his own, and he sticks to it.

There are rag and waste-paper shops in this retreat, two or three dreadful little greengrocers' stalls, a pawnbroker's, a surprizing number of cobblers, and in the core of the place, where the alley widens into the semblance of a dwarfed court, a nest of dealers in theatrical finery, dancing-shoes, pasteboard rounds of beef and cutlets, stage armor, and second-hand play-books.

Here comes an elephant rolling along, and the holy ones with humps discreetly retire aside, covering their retreat before a force majeure by stepping up to the nearest greengrocer's stall and abstracting a generous mouthful of the most succulent of his wares.

There are rag and waste-paper shops in this retreat, two or three dreadful little greengrocers' stalls, a pawnbroker's, a surprizing number of cobblers, and in the core of the place, where the alley widens into the semblance of a dwarfed court, a nest of dealers in theatrical finery, dancing-shoes, pasteboard rounds of beef and cutlets, stage armor, and second-hand play-books.