“Your fatal discovery on the morning of my departure makes you the only man to whom I can appeal.  Let me pray the appeal be not in vain.  In the folly of my youth, while sojourning in Italy, I joined a powerful secret order, whose demands cease only with death, and whose penalty for denial is a sudden and bloody end.  You can judge, then, my anxiety on being compelled to admit to my establishment, disguised as a servant, one of its highest officers, and my horror at hearing of his abrupt departure.  Since then I have learned the unhappy cause.  My life is in another’s hands.  It is for him to command, and for me blindly to obey.  There are two beings in this world dearer to me than my soul’s salvation.  To you, M. Granger, as a Christian gentleman, I commend them.  The sealed note inclosed (the contents of which are a matter of life and death) I beg you will at once deliver to my wife; and let me conjure you, until the crisis is over, to make my house at Romainville your home.

“EDOUARD PONTALBA.”

Leaf the Last.

This is the 15th of January, 1858.  France is in a blaze of excitement.  Last evening, in the Rue Lepelletier, an attempt was made to assassinate the Emperor, by throwing grenades filled with fulminating mercury under the coach that bore the Imperial family to the Italian Opera.  Count Felice Orsini, the murderer, himself desperately wounded, has been arrested, and Paris is crying for his blood.

For several days I have been the honored guest of Madame Althie Pontalba.  It is a golden evening; the sky, an hour ago so clear and blue, is piled with golden clouds, and stretches out into golden rivers, with golden banks, flowing calmly down into a golden sea.  The purple slates on the church-steeple, the red tiles on the house-tops, the gardens with their evergreens and jonquils and little blue violets shrinking out of the frosty air, are wrapped in a golden mist.  The light streams through the windows in rays of pure gold, and trickles down the walls in little golden currents.  It is an enchanting little villa.  The steep gables covered with variegated slate, the thin fluted columns of the verandas, the diminutive marble steps, the broad bow-windows with their transparent plate-glass, look more like a fairy picture than a reality.  The trim shrubbery, the airy little statues, and even the white palings, so frail and fanciful in their construction, are charmingly appropriate.

It is an enchanting little room.  The icy air is warmed by the bright carpet and glowing curtains, and the trickling currents of golden light on the walls are mellowed by the blazing sea-coals.  It is a merry little fire, an ardent, earnest, home fire, that shoots out its whimsical little flames as if it meant to burn one to a cinder, and flutters and murmurs to itself and scatters down the white feathery ashes in a very ecstasy of impetuous glee.  The green porcelain tiles on the hearth, the oval-shaped