him. She was an ingenious and inventive creature, and made her own
cat-o'-nine-tails: an inventor is for ever demonstrating the merits
of his implement. Soon, discovering that he was thankless and
unteachable, she made him enter, as youngest clerk, the law-office
of her admirer and attorney, Constabule. This gentleman, not finding
enough engrossing work to keep the lad out of mischief, allowed him to
sweep his rooms and blacken his boots. Little Joliet, after giving a
volatile air to a great many of his employer's briefs by making paper
chickens of them, showed his imperfect sense of the favors done him
by absconding. In fact, proud and independent, he was brooding over
boyish schemes of an honorable living and a hasty fortune. He soon
found that every profession required an apprenticeship, and that an
apprenticeship could only be bought for money. He was obliged, then,
to seek his grand fortune through somewhat obscure avenues. If I
were to follow my poor Joliet through all his transmigrations and
metempsychoses, as I have learned them by his hints, allusions and
confessions, I should show him by turns working a rope ferry, where
the stupid and indolent cattle, whose business it is to draw men, were
drawn by him; then letter-carrier; supernumerary and call-boy in a
village theatre; road-mender on a vicinal route; then a beadle,
a bell-ringer, and a sub-teacher in an infant school, where he
distributed his own ignorance impartially amongst his little patrons
at the end of a stick; after this, big drum in the New Year's
festivals, and ready at a moment's opportunity to throw down the
drumstick and plunge among the dancers, for Joliet was a well-hinged
lad, and the blood of nineteen years was tingling in his heels. After
fluttering thus from branch to branch, like the poor birdling that
cannot take its flight, discouraged by his wretched attempts at life,
he plunged straight before him, hoping for nothing but a turn of luck,
driving over the roads and fields, lending a hand to the farmers,