TRANSFORMATION.


If you grind castor sugar with an equal quantity of chlorate of potash,
the result is an innocent-looking white compound, sweet to the taste,
and sometimes beneficial in the case of a sore throat. But if you dip a
glass rod into a small quantity of sulphuric acid, and merely touch the
harmless-appearing mixture with the wet end of the rod, the dish which
contains it becomes instantly a roaring furnace of fire, vomiting forth
a fountain of burning balls, and filling the room with a dense, black,
suffocating cloud of smoke.

So strange a combination is that mystery which we term Human Nature,
that a touch of adverse circumstance may transform a quiet, peaceable,
law-abiding citizen into a malefactor whose heart is filled with a
desire for vengeance, stopping at nothing to accomplish it.

In a little narrow street off the broad Rue de Rennes, near the great
terminus of Mont-Parnasse, stood the clock-making shop of the brothers
Delore. The window was filled with cheap clocks, and depending from a
steel spring attached to the top of the door was a bell, which rang
when any one entered, for the brothers were working clockmakers,
continually busy in the room at the back of the shop, and trade in the
neighbourhood was not brisk enough to allow them to keep an assistant.
The brothers had worked amicably in this small room for twenty years,
and were reported by the denizens of that quarter of Paris to be
enormously rich. They were certainly contented enough, and had plenty
of money for their frugal wants, as well as for their occasional
exceedingly mild dissipations at the neighbouring café. They had always
a little money for the church, and a little money for charity, and no