of dust and chaff that had stood surprisingly long went to the winds, and Saint Antoine had got him! It was known directly to the furthest confines of the crowd. Defarge had but sprung over a railing and a table, and folded the miserable wretch in a deadly embrace-Madame Defarge had but followed and turned her hand in one of the ropes with which he was tied-The Vengeance and Jacques Three were not yet up with them, and the men at the windows had not yet swooped into the Hall, like birds of prey, from their high perches-when the cry seemed to go up, all over the city, "Bring him out! Bring him to the lamp!" Down, and up, and head foremost on the steps of the building; now on his knees; now on his feet; now on his back; dragged, and struck at, and stifled by the bunches of grass and straw that were thrust into his face by hundreds of hands; torn, bruised, panting, bleeding, yet always entreating and beseeching for mercy; now full of vehement agony of action, with a small clear space about him as the people drew one another back that they might see; now a log of dead wood drawn through a forest of legs; he was hauled to the nearest street corner where one of the fatal lamps swung, and there Madame Defarge let him go -as a cat might have done to a mouse-and silently and composedly looked at him while they made ready, and while he besought her: the women passionately screeching at him all the time, and the men sternly calling out to have him killed with grass in his mouth. Once he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; twice he went aloft, and the rope broke, and they caught him shrieking; then the rope was merciful and held him, and his head was soon upon a pike, with grass enough in the mouth for all Saint Antoine to dance at the sight of. Nor was this the end of the day's bad work, for Saint Antoine so shouted and danced his angry blood up, that it boiled again, on hearing when the day closed in that the son-in-law of the dispatched, another of the people's enemies and insulters, was coming into Paris under a guard five hundred strong, in cavalry alone. Saint Antoine wrote his crimes on flaring sheets of paper, seized him-would have torn him out of the breast of an army to bear Foulon company-set his head and heart on pikes, and carried the three spoils of the day in Wolf-procession through the streets. nourishment into the flinty viands, and struck some sparks of cheerfulness out of them. Fathers and mothers, who had had their full share in the worst of the day, played gently with their meagre children; and lovers, with such a world around them and before them, loved and hoped. "Almost." It was almost morning when Defarge's wineshop parted with its last knot of customers, and Monsieur Defarge said to madame his wife, in husky tones, while fastening the door: "At last it is come, my dear!" "Eh well!" returned madame. Saint Antoine slept, the Defarges slept; even The Vengeance slept with her starved grocer, and the drum was at rest. The drum's was the only voice in Saint Antoine that blood and hurry had not changed. The Vengeance, as custodian of the drum, could have wakened him up, and had the same speech out of him as before the Bastile fell or old Foulon was seized; not so with the hoarse tones of the men and women in Saint Antoine's bosom. CHAPTER XXIII. FIRE RISES. THERE was a change on the village where the fountain fell, and where the mender of roads went forth daily to hammer out of the stones on the highway such morsels of bread as might serve for patches to hold his poor ignorant soul and his poor reduced body together. The prison on the crag was not so dominant as of yore; there were soldiers to guard it, but not many; there were officers to guard the soldiers, but not one of them knew what his men would do-beyond this: that it would probably not be what he was ordered. Far and wide lay a ruined country yielding nothing but desolation. Every green leaf, every blade of grass and blade of grain, was as shriveled and poor as the miserable people. Every thing was bowed down, dejected, oppressed, and broken. Habitations, fences, domesticated animals, men, women, children, and the soil that bore them—all worn out. Monseigneur was indubitably a national blessing, a gentleman giving a chivalrous tone to things, a polite example of luxurious and shining life, and a great deal more to equal purpose; nevertheless Monseigneur had, somehow or other, brought things to this. Strange that Creation, designed expressly for Monseigneur, should be so soon wrung dry and squeezed out! There must be something short-sighted in the eternal arrangements surely! Thus it was, however; and the last drop of blood having been extracted from the flints, and the last screw of the rack having been turned so often that its purchase crumbled, and it now turned and turned with nothing to bite, Monseigneur began to run away from a phenomenon so low and unaccountable. Not before dark night did the men and women come back to the children, wailing and breadless. Then the miserable bakers' shops were beset by long files of them, patiently waiting to buy bad bread; and while they waited with stomachs faint and empty, they beguiled the time by embracing one another on the triumphs of the day, and achieving them again in gossip. Gradually these strings of ragged people shortened and frayed away; and then poor lights began to shine in high windows, and slen- But this was not the change on the village, der fires were made in the streets, at which and on many a village like it. For scores of neighbors cooked in common, afterward sup-years gone by Monseigneur had squeezed it and ping at their doors. wrung it to his heart's content, and had seldom Scanty and insufficient suppers those, and in-graced it with his presence except for the pleasnocent of meat, as of most other sauce to wretch-ures of the chase-now found in hunting the ed bread. Yet human fellowship infused some people; now found in hunting the beasts, for whose preservation Monseigneur made edifying | spaces of barbarous and barren wilderness. No. The change consisted in the appearance of strange faces of low caste, rather than in the disappearance of the high-caste, chiseled, and otherwise beatified and beatifying features of Monseigneur. For in these times, as the mender of roads worked, solitary, in the dust, not often troubling himself to reflect that dust he was and to dust he must return, being for the most part too much occupied in thinking how little he had for supper and how much more he would eat if he had it-in these times, as he raised his eyes from his lonely labor and viewed the prospect, he would see some rough figure approaching on foot, the like of which was once a rarity in those parts, but was now a frequent presence. As it advanced the mender of roads would discern without surprise that it was a shaggy-haired man, of almost barbarian aspect, tall, in wooden shoes that were clumsy even to the eyes of a mender of roads, grim, rough, swart, steeped in the mud and dust of many highways, dank with the marshy moisture of many low grounds, sprinkled with the thorns and leaves and moss of many by-ways through woods. Such a man came upon him, like a ghost, at " noon in the July weather, as he sat on his heap of stones under a bank, taking such shelter as he could get from a shower of hail. The man looked at him, looked at the village in the hollow, at the mill, and at the prison on the crag. When he had identified these objects in what benighted mind he had, he said, in a dialect that was just intelligible, "How goes it, Jacques?" "All well, Jacques." "Touch then!" They joined hands, and the man sat down on the heap of stones. "No dinner?" "Nothing but supper now," said the mender of roads, with a hungry face. "It is the fashion," growled the man. meet no dinner any where." "I He took out a blackened pipe, filled it, lighted it with flint and steel, pulled at it until it was in a bright glow: then suddenly held it from him and dropped something into it from between his finger and thumb, that blazed and went out in a puff of smoke. "Touch then." It was the turn of the mender of roads to say it this time, after observing these operations. They again joined hands. "To-night?" said the mender of roads. "To-night," said the man, putting the pipe | together, and all things ready to go down into in his mouth. "Where?" "Here." He and the mender of roads sat on the heap of stones looking silently at one another, with the hail driving in between them like a pigmy charge of bayonets, until the sky began to clear over the village. "Show me!" said the traveler then, moving to the brow of the hill. "See!" returned the mender of roads, with extended finger. "You go down here, and straight through the street, and past the fountain" "To the Devil with all that!" interrupted the other, rolling his eye over the landscape. "I go through no streets and past no fountains. Well ?" "Well! About two leagues beyond the summit of that hill above the village." "Good. When do you cease to work?" "At sunset." Surely." a The wayfarer smoked his pipe out, put it in his breast, slipped off his great wooden shoes, and lay down on his back on the heap of stones. He was fast asleep directly. As the road-mender plied his dusty labor, and the hail-clouds, rolling away, revealed bright bars and streaks of sky which were responded to by silver gleams upon the landscape, the little man (who wore a red cap now in place of his blue one) seemed fascinated by the figure on the heap of stones. His eyes were so often turned toward it that he used his tools mechanically; and, one would have said, to very poor account. The bronze face, the shaggy black hair and beard, the coarse woolen red cap, the rough medley dress of homespun stuff and hairy skins of beasts, the powerful frame attenuated by spare living, and the sullen and desperate compression of the lips in sleep, inspired the mender of roads with awe. The traveler had traveled far, and his feet were footsore, and his ankles chafed and bleeding; his great shoes, stuffed with leaves and grass, had been heavy to drag over the many long leagues, and his clothes were chafed into holes, as he himself was into sores. Stooping down beside him, the road-mender tried to get a peep at secret weapons in his breast or where not; but in vain, for he slept with his arms crossed upon him, and set as resolutely as his lips. Fortified towns with their stockades, guard-houses, gates, trenches, and draw-bridges, seemed, to the mender of roads, to be so much air as against this figure. And when he lifted his eyes from it to the horizon and looked around, he saw in his small fancy similar figures, stopped by no obstacle, tending to centres all over France. The man slept on, indifferent to showers of hail and intervals of brightness, to sunshine on his face and shadow, to the pattering lumps of dall ice on his body and the diamonds into which the sun changed them, until the sun was low in the west, and the sky was glowing. Then the mender of roads, having got his tools the village, roused him. "Good!" said the sleeper, rising on his elbow. "Two leagues beyond the summit of the hill ?" "About." "About. Good!" The mender of roads went home, with the dust going on before him according to the set of the wind, and was soon at the fountain, squeezing himself in among the lean kine brought there to drink, and appearing even to whisper to them in his whispering to all the village. When the village had taken its poor supper it did not creep to bed, as it usually did, but came out of doors again, and remained there. A curious contagion of whispering was upon it, and also, when it gathered together at the fountain in the dark, another curious contagion of looking expectantly at the sky in one direction only. Monsieur Gabelle, chief functionary of the place, became uneasy; went out on his house-top alone, and looked in that direction too; glanced down from behind his chimneys at the darkening faces by the fountain below, and sent word to the sacristan who kept the keys of the church that there might be need to ring the tocsin by-and-by. The night deepened. The trees environing the old chateau, keeping its solitary state apart, moved in a rising wind, as though they threatened the pile of building massive and dark in the gloom. Up the two terrace flights of steps the rain ran wildly, and beat at the great door, like a swift messenger rousing those within; uneasy rushes of wind went through the hall, among the old spears and knives, and passed lamenting up the stairs, and shook the curtains of the bed where the last Marquis had slept. East, West, North, and South, through the woods, four heavy-treading, unkempt figures crushed the high grass and cracked the branches, striding on cautiously to come together in the court-yard. Four lights broke out there, and moved away in different directions, and all was black again. But not for long. Presently the chateau began to make itself strangely visible by some light of its own, as though it were growing luminous. Then a flickering streak played behind the architecture of the front, picking out transparent places, and showing where balustrades, arches, and windows were. Then it soared higher, and grew broader and brighter. Soon from a score of the great windows flames burst forth, and the stone faces, awakened, stared out of fire. A faint murmur arose about the house from the few people who were left there, and there was saddling of a horse and riding away. There was spurring and splashing through the darkness, and bridle was drawn in the space by the village fountain, and the horse in a foam stood at Monsieur Gabelle's door. "Help, Gabelle! Help, every one!" The tocsin rang impatiently, but other help (if that were any) there was none. The mender of roads, and two hundred and fifty particular friends, stood with folded arms at the fountain, looking at the pillar of fire in the sky. "It must be forty feet high," said they, grimly; and never moved. The rider from the chateau, and the horse in a foam, clattered away through the village, and galloped up the stony steep to the prison on the crag. At the gate a group of officers were looking at the fire; removed from them, a group of soldiers. "Help, gentlemen-officers! The chateau is on fire; valuable objects may be saved from the flames by timely aid! Help! help!" The officers looked toward the soldiers, who looked at the fire; gave no orders; and answered, with shrugs and biting of lips, "It must burn." As the rider rattled down the hill again and through the street the village was illuminating. The mender of roads, and the two hundred and fifty particular friends, inspired as one man and woman by the idea of lighting up, had darted into their houses, and were putting candles in every dull little pane of glass. The general scarcity of every thing occasioned candles to be borrowed in a rather peremptory manner of Monsieur Gabelle; and in a moment of reluctance and hesitation on that functionary's part the mender of roads, once so submissive to authority, had remarked that carriages were good to make bonfires with, and that post-horses would roast. The chateau was left to itself to flame and burn. In the roaring and raging of the conflagration a red-hot wind, driving straight from the infernal regions, seemed to be blowing the edifice away. With the rising and falling of the blaze the stone faces showed as if they were in torment. When great masses of stone and timber fell the face with the two dints in the nose became obscured: anon struggled out of the smoke again, as if it were the face of the cruel Marquis burning at the stake and contending with the fire. The chateau burned; the nearest trees, laid hold of by the fire, scorched and shriveled; trees at a distance, fired by the four fierce figures, begirt the blazing edifice with a new forest of smoke. Molten lead and iron boiled in the marble basin of the fountain; the water ran dry; the extinguisher tops of the towers vanished like ice before the heat, and trickled down into four rugged wells of flame. Great rents and splits branched out in the solid walls like crystallization; stupefied birds wheeled about and dropped into the furnace; four fierce figures trudged away, East, West, North, and South, along the night-enshrouded roads, guided by the beacon they had lighted, toward their next destination. The illuminated village had seized hold of the tocsin, and, abolishing the lawful ringer, rang for joy. Not only that; but the village, light-headed with famine, fire, and bell-ringing, and bethinking itself that Monsieur Gabelle had to do with the collection of rent and taxes-though it was but a small installment of taxes, and no rent at all, that Gabelle had got in in those latter days -became impatient for an interview with him, and, surrounding his house, summoned him to come forth for personal conference. Whereupon Monsieur Gabelle did heavily bar his door, and retire to hold counsel with himself. The result of that conference was that Gabelle again withdrew himself to his house-top behind his stack of chimneys: this time resolved, if his door were broken in (he was a small Southern man of retaliative temperament), to pitch himself head foremost over the parapet and crush a man or two below. Probably Monsieur Gabelle passed a long night up there, with the distant chateau for fire and candle, and the beating at his door, combined with the joy-ringing, for music, not to mention his having an ill-omened lamp slung across the road before his posting-house gate, which the village showed a lively inclination to displace in his favor. A trying suspense to be passing a whole summer night on the brink of the black ocean, ready to take that plunge into it upon which Monsieur Gabelle had resolved! But the friendly dawn appearing at last, and the rushcandles of the village guttering out, the people happily dispersed, and Monsieur Gabelle came down, bringing his life with him for that while. Within a hundred miles, and in the light of other fires, there were other functionaries less fortunate, that night and other nights, whom the rising sun found hanging across once-peaceful streets, where they had been born and bred; also there were other villagers and townspeople less fortunate than the mender of roads and his fellows, upon whom the functionaries and soldiery turned with success, and whom they strung up in their turn. But the fierce figures were steadily wending East, West, North, and South, be that as it would; and whosoever hung, fire burned. The altitude of the gallows that would turn to water and quench it, no functionary, by any stretch of mathematics, was able to calculate successfully. to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore — three years of tempest were consumed. Three more birthdays of little Lucie had been woven by the golden thread into the peaceful tissue of the life of her home. Many a night and many a day had its inmates listened to the echoes in the corner, with hearts that failed them when they heard the thronging feet. For the footsteps had become to their minds as the footsteps of a people, tumultuous under a red flag, and with their country declared in danger, changed into wild beasts, by terrible enchantment long persisted in. Monseigneur, as a class, had dissociated himself from the phenomenon of his not being appreciated: of his being so little wanted in France as to incur considerable danger of receiving his dismissal from it, and this life together. Like the fabled rustic who raised the Devil with infinite pains, and was so terrified at the sight of him that he could ask the Enemy no question, but immediately fled; so Monseigneur, after boldly reading the Lord's Prayer backward for a great number of years, and performing many other potent spells for compelling the Evil One, no sooner beheld him in his terrors than he took to his noble heels. The shining Bull's Eye of the Court was gone, or it would have been the mark for a hurricane of national bullets. It had never been a good eye to see with-had long had the mote in it of Lucifer's pride, Sardanapalus's luxury, and a mole's blindness-but it had dropped out and was gone. The Court, from that exclusive inner circle to its outermost rotten ring of intrigue, corruption, and dissimulation, was all gone together. Royalty was gone; had been besieged in its Palace and "suspended," when the last tidings came over. The August of the year one thousand seven hundred and ninety-two was come, and Monseigneur was by this time scattered far and wide. As was natural, the head-quarters and great gathering-place of Monseigneur, in London, was Tellson's Bank. Spirits are supposed to haunt the places where their bodies most resorted, and Monseigneur, without a guinea, haunted the spot where his guineas used to be. Moreover, it was the spot to which such French intelligence as was most to be relied upon came quickest. Again: Tellson's was a munificent house, and extended great liberality to old customers who had fallen from their high estate. Again those nobles who had seen the coming storm in time, and, anticipating plunder or confiscation, had made provident remittances to Tellson's, were always to be heard of there by their needy brethren. To which it must be added that every new-comer from France reported himself and his tidings at Tellson's, almost as a matter of course. For such variety of reasons, Tellson's was at that time, as to French intelligence, a kind of High Exchange; and this was so well known to the public, and the inquiries made there were in consequence so numerous, that Tellson's sometimes wrote the latest news out in a line or so and posted it in the Bank windows, for all who ran through Temple Bar to read. ing on it, talking with him in a low voice. The penitential den once set apart for interviews with the House was now the News Exchange, and was filled to overflowing. It was within half an hour or so of the time of closing. "But, although you are the youngest man that ever lived," said Charles Darnay, rather hesitating, "I must still suggest to you-” "I understand. That I am too old?" said Mr. Lorry. "Unsettled weather, a long journey, uncertain means of traveling, a disorganized country, a city that may not even be safe to you." 66 'My dear Charles," said Mr. Lorry, with cheerful confidence, "you touch some of the reasons for my going: not for my staying away. It is safe enough for me; nobody will care to interfere with an old fellow of hard upon fourscore when there are so many people there much better worth interfering with. As to its being a disorganized city, if it were not a disorganized city there would be no occasion to send somebody from our House here to our House there, who knows the city and the business of old, and is in Tellson's confidence. to the uncertain traveling, the long journey, and the winter weather, if I were not prepared to submit myself to a few inconveniences for the sake of Tellson's, after all these years, who ought to be?" As "I wish I were going myself," said Charles Darnay, somewhat restlessly, and like one thinking aloud. Indeed! You are a pretty fellow to object and advise!" exclaimed Mr. Lorry. "You wish you were going yourself? And you a Frenchman born? You are a wise counselor!" 66 'My dear Mr. Lorry, it is because I am a Frenchman born that the thought (which I did not mean to utter here, however) has passed through my mind often. One can not help thinking, having had some sympathy for the miserable people, and having abandoned something to them"-he spoke here in his former thoughtful manner-"that one might be listened to, and might have the power to persuade to some restraint. Only last night, after you had left us, when I was talking to Lucie"When you were talking to Lucie!" Mr. Lorry repeated. "Yes. I wonder you are not ashamed to mention the name of Lucie ! Wishing you were going to France at this time of day!" "However, I am not going," said Charles Darnay, with a smile. "It is more to the purpose that you say you are." "And I am, in plain reality. The truth is, my dear Charles," Mr. Lorry glanced at the distant House, and lowered his voice, "you can have no conception of the difficulty with which our business is transacted, and of the peril in which our books and papers over yonder are involved. The Lord above knows what the compromising consequences would be to numbers of people if some of our documents were seized or destroyed; and they might be at any time, you know, for who can say that Paris is not set afire to-day, or sacked to-morrow? Now, a judicious selection from these with the least possible delay, and the burying of them, or otherwise getOn a steaming, misty afternoon, Mr. Lorry ting of them out of harm's way, is within the sat at his desk, and Charles Darnay stood lean- | power (without loss of precious time) of scarce |