in 1793, was torn from the grave in the church of the Sorbonne and rudely trampled under foot, after the head had been cut off and exhibited to the bystanders. Passing into the possession of a grocer, the head was sold to M. Armez père, and transferred successively to several persons, till at last attempts were made, but made in vain, in 1846 and 1855, by the Historical Committee of Arts and Monuments, to repair the profanation. "We accuse no one," says Feuillet de Conches, who relates these incidents in his "Variétés d'Histoire et d'Art;""still, the fact is undeniable that this terrible head, the personification of the absolute monarchy killing the aristocratic monarchy, is wandering upon the earth like a spectre that has straggled out of the domain of the dead." In the same year the fine marble statue of the great Cardinal at the Château de Melraye was decapitated, and the head used by an ultrarepublican of the district as a balance-weight for a roasting-jack!

Conscience

WHY is there so little conscientiousness

and Umbrellas. regarding the appropriation of umbrellas? Every man who has owned, or rather fancied he owned, an umbrella, must have discovered that there is something peculiar about this species of property which differentiates it from every other chattel or hereditament. " "T was mine, 't is his, and has been slave to thousands,” is a wellworn saying of Shakespeare, which is as true of almost every umbrella as of gold and silver coin. Umbrellas are a puzzle to us; there is a mystery, an enigma, about them which we cannot penetrate. That they are actually sold, that people do buy and pay cash for them, under the fond illusion that they acquire in them an exclusive property, is

evident from the fact that shops are established, and kept open for years, where you see these volatile and inconstant articles exposed for sale. Besides, how often do you hear some confiding man or woman, who has cherished the ridiculous idea of property in these articles, lamenting most pathetically the loss, by abduction or exchange, of a treacherous fabric of silk and whalebone (which he solemnly protests that he had paid for) on the very day he had naïvely attempted to make it his own! So umbrellas are bought by some persons, incredible as it may seem; but what a purchase! One might as well buy a will-of-thewisp, a rainbow, a fata morgana, or a cubic acre of wind, in the hope of holding it permanently or selling it some day at an advance.

Umbrellas have no adhesiveness, no tenacity. No sooner have you begun to cultivate their acquaintance-friendship is out of the question — than, like a pickpocket at sight of a constable, like a sailor's money on shore, or a five-dollar bill changed into silver, they vanish from sight. No man can ever safely say, "I own an umbrella," unless at that moment he grasps it in his hand. The man to whom you might safely intrust your diamonds, your watch, or your gold, proves false when, in a moment of unsuspecting confidence, you lend him your umbrella. Consciences that in other cases are tremblingly sensitive regarding the slightest infringement upon the rights of property, are absolutely torpid when the property is an umbrella. Dean Buckland, an English prelate, was so convinced of this by his own bitter experience, that he had engraved upon his last parapluie these words: "Stolen from the Dean of Westminster." Even this lack of conscientiousness is not more amazing than the tameness with which men acquiesce in

the robbery of an umbrella. He who would be furious, and who would seek instant redress, if robbed of a coat or a hat; who would pursue the boy that had stolen fruit from his apple-tree, and raise an instant hue-and-cry against the thief who had snatched his watch, or even his walking-stick; will meekly submit to the appropriation of his "rain-screen," and redress his injury by a foolish investment in another.

It will, doubtless, be said that some of the vagrancy of umbrellas may be attributed to mistakes, especially at hotels. But pardon us, reader-how happens it, in that case, that nobody ever mistakes a poorer one for his own? Why is it that only the old, worn-out, faded, and ugly ones are left in the rack? Why is it that cotton umbrellas are never taken by accident for silk? These are notable phenomena, which utterly upset the beautiful theory of mistakes, and awaken grave suspicions of design. Let your umbrella be exchanged twice or thrice in this way, and you will find yourself to have sunk from a light, elegant, ivory-handled, silk article, which cost you ten or twelve dollars, to a blue, brass-ringed dowdy, which turns inside out at the first gust of wind, and was worth when new hardly a tithe of that sum.

In opposition to what we have said of the vagrancy of umbrellas, a Kansas editor asserted, some years ago, that there was an old gentleman in Booneville, in that State, who had carried the same identical umbrella every day in the week for sixteen consecutive years! (Jupiter Pluvius must have been in the ascendant there!) But this assertion, staggering to one's credulity as it is, sinks into insignificance when compared with an astounding statement made by the Salem (Mass.) "Register." The editor of

that journal once had the hardihood to assert that a gentleman in that city of marvels had an umbrella, still in good order, mark that! which he had used on all proper occasions for - - what length of time do you guess, reader? For a month, six months, or, possibly, a year? No, but for forty-seven years! He "imported it from Liverpool, and it had been serviceable during nearly half a century!" In all that long time it had not been damaged, exchanged, or stolen.

That will do! Human credulity, we are aware, has depths which no line or plummet can fathom. History and biography show that the acutest and most sagacious men have been the victims of the most unaccountable hallucinations. Socrates believed in a prompting dæmon, by whom he was always attended; Luther, in a malicious imp, by whom he was always flouted. Dr. Johnson, as everybody knows, believed in the second sight and the Cock lane ghost; De Quincey fancied he had a hippopotamus, or some other horrid creature, in his stomach; Professor Hare believed in the rapping revelations of defunct Washingtons and Websters; Professor Huxley, who rejects Christianity, is said to be a devout believer in the existence of the sea-serpent, and declares that those who laugh at the idea of a monster of the deep, big enough to drag down whole ships and their crews, are both foolish and ignorant. But none of these delusions, absurd and ridiculous as they are, approximate in grossness to the hallucination of the man who tells, or the person who credits, the Salem umbrella-story. The man who can believe it will swallow all the stories of the Talmud and the narrations of Trenck and Munchausen with his eyes wide open.

Queer Roads to Fame.

Ir is said that the Duke of Wellington once "chaffed" Lord Brougham as a man who at one time bade fair to go down to future ages as a famous advocate of law-reform and popular education, but who, after all, would owe his renown to the name of the vehicle which had received his name. Brougham retorted by saying to the Duke that his name, which promised to descend to after-times as the hero of a hundred battles and the liberator of Europe, was to survive as the appellation of a certain kind of boots. The story is a good one, whether true or mythical, and suggests to us some of the strange ways in which men become famous.

One person acquires celebrity by his giant intellect, as Webster or Calhoun; another, by his dwarf stature, as Count Borowalski, or Tom Thumb. There are great men who are known to fame hardly less by their physical or moral eccentricities than by their intellectual might. Such was the case with Lord Brougham, who was long associated in men's minds with the queer twist of his nose, on which Punch hung so many conceits; and with Lord Peterborough, who, walking from the market in a blue ribbon, with a fowl under one arm and a cabbage under the other, quite threw into the shade Lord Peterborough, the hero of Almanza. The same was the case with the great Duke of Marlborough, whose hagglings with the Bath chairmen and acts of petty avarice were talked of long after the conqueror at Blenheim and Malplaquet was forgotten. Again, we saw, some fifty years ago, a Member of Congress from the West acquire a transatlantic reputation by the place and manner in which he chose to devour his luncheon of bread and sausages.