splendor and elegance of their appearance while under her care; of
their barefooted squalor in Venice, a month afterwards; of their shabby
habiliments at Laybach? Had the father gambled away his money, and
sold their clothes? How came they to have passed out of the hands of a
refined lady (as she evidently was, with whom I first saw them) into the
charge of quite a common woman like her with whom I saw one of the boys
at Venice? Here is but one chapter of the story. Can any man write the
next, or that preceding the strange one on which I happened to light?
Who knows? the mystery may have some quite simple solution. I saw two
children, attired like little princes, taken from their mother and
consigned to other care; and a fortnight afterwards, one of them
barefooted and like a beggar. Who will read this riddle of The Two
Children in Black?




ON RIBBONS.


The uncle of the present Sir Louis N. Bonaparte, K.G., &c., inaugurated
his reign as Emperor over the neighboring nation by establishing an
Order, to which all citizens of his country, military, naval, and
civil--all men most distinguished in science, letters, arts, and
commerce--were admitted. The emblem of the Order was but a piece of
ribbon, more or less long or broad, with a toy at the end of it.
The Bourbons had toys and ribbons of their own, blue, black, and
all-colored; and on their return to dominion such good old Tories would
naturally have preferred to restore their good old orders of Saint
Louis, Saint Esprit, and Saint Michel; but France had taken the ribbon