men who run great risks, it is not merely the love of money which urges them to these enterprises. These intelligent speculators are not, as is generally thought in France, avaricious usurers; the majority of them are men gifted with powerful minds, and who, in the delicacy of their sentiments, carry us back to the periods of Amadis and Galaor. It was reserved for our witty nation to discover that these courageous merchants, who condemn themselves to a perilous and voluntary exile in order to share the riches acquired by their own labour with some loved one at home, were devoid of all poetic sentiment, and had ingots of gold in place of hearts! I have known a great many of these hardy adventurers, who lived in this commercial Bœotia without complaining that they were not understood by the bankers of their own country, and by the tea-dealers of the Celestial Empire, possessing as their sole consolation in the midst of their irksome labour, the hope that one day they would see again some fair head which was then hidden in some corner of Kentucky, in the mountains of Scotland, or the sweet cottages of Albion. I can affirm that the steamer which brings to those sad edifices, the factories, the European or American mail, distributes almost as many soft protestations and tender oaths as commercial bills and inexorable accounts. And those impassible merchants, who unseal without emotion a missive on which some-
