in a hurry to laugh and show his wit, and where jest and epigram enliven all things, even the poverty of the lower classes and the weightier cares of the solid bourgeois.  In a coach there is no police to check tongues, and legislative assemblies have set the fashion of public discussion.  When a young man of twenty-two, like the one named Georges, is clever and lively, he is much tempted, especially under circumstances like the present, to abuse those qualities.

In the first place, Georges had soon decided that he was the superior human being of the party there assembled.  He saw in the count a manufacturer of the second-class, whom he took, for some unknown reason, to be a chandler; in the shabby young man accompanied by Mistigris, a fellow of no account; in Oscar a ninny, and in Pere Leger, the fat farmer, an excellent subject to hoax.  Having thus looked over the ground, he resolved to amuse himself at the expense of such companions.

“Let me see,” he thought to himself, as the coucou went down the hill from La Chapelle to the plain of Saint-Denis, “shall I pass myself off for Etienne or Beranger?  No, these idiots don’t know who they are.  Carbonaro? the deuce!  I might get myself arrested.  Suppose I say I’m the son of Marshal Ney?  Pooh! what could I tell them?—­about the execution of my father?  It wouldn’t be funny.  Better be a disguised Russian prince and make them swallow a lot of stuff about the Emperor Alexander.  Or I might be Cousin, and talk philosophy; oh, couldn’t I perplex ’em!  But no, that shabby fellow with the tousled head looks to me as if he had jogged his way through the Sorbonne.  What a pity!  I can mimic an Englishman so perfectly I might have pretended to be Lord Byron, travelling incognito.  Sapristi!  I’ll command the troops of Ali, pacha of Janina!”

During this mental monologue, the coucou rolled through clouds of dust rising on either side of it from that much travelled road.

“What dust!” cried Mistigris.

“Henry IV. is dead!” retorted his master.  “If you’d say it was scented with vanilla that would be emitting a new opinion.”

“You think you’re witty,” replied Mistigris.  “Well, it is like vanilla at times.”

“In the Levant—­” said Georges, with the air of beginning a story.

“‘Ex Oriente flux,’” remarked Mistigris’s master, interrupting the speaker.

“I said in the Levant, from which I have just returned,” continued Georges, “the dust smells very good; but here it smells of nothing, except in some old dust-barrel like this.”

“Has monsieur lately returned from the Levant?” said Mistigris, maliciously.  “He isn’t much tanned by the sun.”

“Oh!  I’ve just left my bed after an illness of three months, from the germ, so the doctors said, of suppressed plague.”

“Have you had the plague?” cried the count, with a gesture of alarm.  “Pierrotin, stop!”

“Go on, Pierrotin,” said Mistigris.  “Didn’t you hear him say it was inward, his plague?” added the rapin, talking back to Monsieur de Serizy.  “It isn’t catching; it only comes out in conversation.”