‘Besides,’ remarked the other, ‘we should each have two and a half francs instead of only one and a half.’
‘Agreed.’
Half an hour later they stood at the door of 109. After some knocking, a very sleepy portress looked out.
‘Look here, Mother Wideawake,’ said one of the guard; ‘here’s one of your lodgers. Do you recognise him?’
‘Why, I should rather think so. It’s Monsieur Décamps’ bear!’
The same day, Odry the actor received a bill for little cakes, amounting to seven francs and a half.
SAÏ THE PANTHER
From Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History.
About seventy or eighty years ago two little panthers were deserted by their mother in one of the forests of Ashantee. They were too young to get food for themselves, and would probably have died had they not been found by a passing traveller, and by him taken to the palace as a present to the king. Here they lived and played happily for several weeks, when one day the elder and larger, whose name was Saï, gave his brother, in fun, such a dreadful squeeze that, without meaning it, he suffocated him. This frightened the king, who did not care to keep such a powerful pet about him, and he gave him away to Mr. Hutchison, an English gentleman, who was a sort of governor for the English traders settled in that part of Africa.