"'C'est tout égal,' replied the commissary.

"'The devil it is!' said I. 'But I will go to ten thousand Bastilles
first. O, England! England! thou land of liberty and climate of
good-sense! thou tenderest of mothers and gentlest of nurses!' cried
I, kneeling upon one knee as I was beginning my apostrophe--when
the director of Madame L. Blanc's conscience coming in at that instant,
and seeing a person in black, with a face as pale as ashes, at
his devotions, asked if I stood in want of the aids of the Church.

"'I go by water,' said I, 'and here's another will be for making
me pay for going by oil.'"

[Footnote 1: It is the penalty--I suppose the just penalty--paid by
habitually extravagant humourists, that _meaning_ not being always
expected of them, it is not always sought by their readers with
sufficient care. Anyhow, it may be suspected that this retort of
Tristram's is too often passed over as a mere random absurdity
designed for his interlocutor's mystification, and that its extremely
felicitous pertinence to the question in dispute is thus overlooked.
The point of it, of course, is that the business in which the
commissary was then engaged was precisely analogous to that of
exacting salt dues from perverse persons who were impoverishing the
revenue by possessing herrings already pickled.]

The commissary, of course, remains obdurate, and Tristram protests
that the treatment to which he is being subjected is "contrary to the
law of nature, contrary to reason, contrary to the Gospel:"

"'But not to this,' said he, putting a printed paper into my hand.