in a kind of mute adoration mingled with
abject terror, and the army abased itself in
like manner. Polydore saw it all. He was
their Fetisch, their Avatar, their King Arthur
Redivivus—their resuscitated Mandrill
Monarch! What could be done, but accept the
rôle which chance and superstition had
thrust upon him? Karabouffi resigned;
and Polydore reigned in his stead. His
first act of regal power was to reunite
Saïmira and Mococo, in spite of the ex-
monarch's jealousy and despair; and, his first
of prudence was, to escape from his
bodyguards, one heavy night full of electricity,
when every monkey slept as if dead, and to
bury the bones of his defunct self.

Time passed on, and monarch and subjects
were mutually well pleased and on eminently
fraternal terms; when, one day, as Polydore
was enforcing some useful lesson on his court,
crack! went the mantle of royalty behind, and
with it his chances of monkey deification. After
an agonising day the rent was repaired at
night—but not very stoutly or enduringly.
A disturbed dream completed the catastrophe,
and behold Polydore Marasquin with his
monkey-skin in two! His reign was over;
his life would also soon be over, for there
was no possibility of sewing himself up again;
and Polydore, without his skin, was a demon
and no demigod to the monkey world. What
should he do? What could he do, indeed,
but fortify himself once more within the
verandah, while his subjects assembled in
troops and howled forth their fond dismay at
his disappearance?

At last, out of guiding love, they began
their bombardment as of old, and Polydore
felt that his hours were numbered. The
walls were cracking; the roof was falling;
death, in the shape of twenty thousand furious
apes, pressed close upon him—when boom!
boom! boom! three cannon-shots. After
waiting and watching, peering curiously this
way and that, Karabouffi gave his signal—
the same long, shrill, strange whistle which
Polydore had heard before; and, swift as a
flash of lightning, the whole monkey world
vanished. Not a trace was to be seen; not
the tip of a tail nor the point of an ear,
where two minutes before had swarmed an
army of twenty thousand howling, fighting,
desperate, and king-deserted apes. The cannon
announced the return of Admiral Campbell
from a cruise after the Malay pirates, and
Polydore Marasquin was saved. Returning
to Macao, he married, became rich, was
independent and happy; but often he was
heard to sigh to himself, and whisper softly:
"Ah! when I was an ape!" He wrote his
"emotions," and made Léon Gozlan his
editor.

M. Léon Gozlan, in a word, is an excellent
French writer, who has written an excellent
and odd book. It has been published at
Paris by M. Michel Lévy, under the title of
Les Émotions de Polydore Marasquin; and
the perusal of these emotions of Polydore
Marasquin has led to the present account of
the Monkey King.

THE TWO JANES.

I dwell in Coketown, but I am thankful
to say I do not work for a Bounderby. All
day long—summer and winter, for six days
a-week—I stand behind a stocking-frame
watching its unvaried movement and listening
to its monotonous march. Under my
feet the huge floor trembles with the roar of
the machinery, and the ceiling vibrates over
my head. Visitors who come to see us—
thirty, forty in a room at our continual toil
—go away dazed and deafened, and athirst.
There are thin fibres floating about the
atmosphere in which we live, they say, that
half frightens them. For our part we know
nothing of this; but when we get out into
the summer evening, we feel a change such
as, perhaps, no riches of man could purchase,
save at the cost price,—the blood from his
cheeks, the flesh from his bones, the light
from his eyes, which is what, for the most
part, each one of us has had to pay for it. The
mere fresh air and the blue sky thus gladdens
us, and not any peculiar beauty of our Coketown
streets which, although clean and neat
are red and staring, and bear the appearance
of having been built yesterday; nor have
they any garden-ground whatever attached
to them beyond that which may cling to the
scrapers; no house which we workmen
inhabit is, in thickness, more than a single
brick; but there is no such thing—even in
the outskirts—as a cottage.

Every man who can afford it, however, has
a little plot of ground without the town, the
merest strip of kitchen-garden, perhaps, but
which bit, never so small, has got an arbour at
one end of it. This is a tool-house as well, to be
sure, but therein we sit after mill-hours, each
with his pipe in his mouth, and from fifteen to
twenty of us may-be to the acre. They call
mine—because I have a little melon-frame
belonging to me—the lodge in the garden of
cucumbers. It is partly this, I think, that
gives the Coketowners such a passion for the
country; for, there are folks in other places
worked as hard as we, who are content with
their public-house and skittle-ground all the
year through, though the sun shine never so
brightly and all the land be in leaf. For me,
who work on my own account and hire my
stocking-frame, I cannot help playing the
truant now and then, and running right away
into the woods and fields. One Wednesday
out of three, perhaps, in the summer months
I spend in this fashion. Rising at five I take
with me a poetry book—of which I have
several—or one of Mr. Hewitt's pleasant
breezy volumes; and, wrapping up a great
hunch of bread and cheese in my pocket-
handkerchief, am furnished and provisioned
for the whole day. I have always some place