in for a legacy? Has he been promoted? Is he hastening to meet his beloved? Or is it simply he has had a good breakfast, and the sense of health, the sense of well-fed prosperity, is at work in all his limbs? Surely they have not put on his neck thy lovely, eight-pointed cross, О Polish king, Stanislas?
No. He has hatched a scandal against a friend, has sedulously sown it abroad, has heard it, this same slander, from the lips of another friend, and—has himself believed it!
Oh, how contented! how kind indeed at this minute is this amiable, promising young man!
February 1878.
A RULE OF LIFE
'If you want to annoy an opponent thoroughly, and even to harm him,' said a crafty old knave to me, 'you reproach him with the very defect or vice you are conscious of in yourself. Be indignant . . . and reproach him!
'To begin with, it will set others thinking you have not that vice.
'In the second place, your indignation may well be sincere . . . You can turn to account the pricks of your own conscience.
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