you that there was once an illustrious personage--[The Emperor
Diocletian]--who made experience of two very different occupations,--one
was ruling men, the other was planting cabbages; he thought planting
cabbages much the pleasanter of the two!




CHAPTER XVIL

Dr. Riccabocca had secured Lenny Fairfield, and might therefore be
considered to have ridden his hobby in the great whirligig with
adroitness and success. But Miss Jemima was still driving round in her
car, handling the reins, and flourishing the whip, without apparently
having got an inch nearer to the flying form of Dr. Riccabocca.

Indeed, that excellent and only too susceptible spinster, with all her
experience of the villany of man, had never conceived the wretch to be so
thoroughly beyond the reach of redemption as when Dr. Riccabocca took his
leave, and once more interred himself amidst the solitudes of the Casino,
and without having made any formal renunciation of his criminal celibacy.
For some days she shut herself up in her own chamber, and brooded with
more than her usual gloomy satisfaction on the certainty of the
approaching crash. Indeed, many signs of that universal calamity, which,
while the visit of Riccabocca lasted, she had permitted herself to
consider ambiguous, now became luminously apparent. Even the newspaper,
which during that credulous and happy period had given half a column to
Births and Marriages, now bore an ominously long catalogue of Deaths; so
that it seemed as if the whole population had lost heart, and had no
chance of repairing its daily losses. The leading article spoke, with