composedly between his lips, Dr. Riceabocca gazed on his own incarcerated
legs, even with complacency.

"'He who can despise all things,'" said he, in one of his native
proverbs, "'possesses all things!'--if one despises freedom, one is free!
This seat is as soft as a sofa! I am not sure," he resumed,
soliloquizing, after a pause,--"I am not sure that there is not something
more witty than manly and philosophical in that national proverb of mine
which I quoted to the fanciullo, 'that there are no handsome prisons'!
Did not the son of that celebrated Frenchman, surnamed Bras de Fer, write
a book not only to prove that adversities are more necessary than
prosperities, but that among all adversities a prison is the most
pleasant and profitable? But is not this condition of mine, voluntarily
and experimentally incurred, a type of my life? Is it the first time
that I have thrust myself into a hobble? And if in a hobble of mine own
choosing, why should I blame the gods?"

Upon this, Dr. Riceabocca fell into a train of musing so remote from time
and place, that in a few minutes he no more remembered that he was in the
parish stocks than a lover remembers that flesh is grass, a miser that
mammon is perishable, a philosopher that wisdom is vanity. Dr.
Riccabocca was in the clouds.




CHAPTER X.

The dullest dog that ever wrote a novel (and, /entre nous/, reader)--but
let it go no further,--we have a good many dogs among the fraternity that