lis, and
thence is scattered to every quarter. Sent to the east, sent to the west, sent to Europe, to Asia, there to gladden thousands, why should not some of it gladden me by gladdening mhie? There is gold enough for others but none for me. I have drank of Acheron, let me now drink of Lethe. My past let me consign to oblivion, and regenerate once more take my place amono; the honorable of the earth. Brino; forth the divining-rod, the witch-hazel of the epidemic demono- pathy, and let its subtleties become so clearly percep- tible to the sublimated brain of the bearer, that the arch-witch gold may be found, aye, gold I aye, gold !
Hundreds went mad. Lunatics roamed the streets at large; indeed, it sometimes seemed as if all were lunatics. Horrible is the disordered laugh of mad- men and fiends ; and so is the hollow mournful mirth of riothio; starvelinorg, makino; dismal with their half- ghostly orgies the lonely canon. But they were not all as insane as they seemed. Should any object dear to them be laid in their pathway, they would turn aside the evil influences of their avarice or morality, as Ulysses, who affected madness to escape the Trojan campaign, turned aside his plough when the infant Telemachus was laid in the furrow.
Prostrate in blank despair, oblivious from drink, or battling undismayed, the life struggle still continues. Walk round the arena, pass by the fortunate — they are the exceptions, and can care for themselves — but glance at some who have fallen. The old white-whis- kered bell-boy who answers your summons at the hotel was once a wholesale grocer, with a business of six millions a year ; that waiter in the restaurant was once colonel in the Austrian service ; an aide-de-camp to Larmorcier hires himself to a paper-hanger; there is a doctor driving a dray, here a graduate of Trinity college, Dublin, tending bar, and so on.
As the development of the country increased its classical abnormities, with some of its greatest charms diminished, and with the glamour of unreality origin-
