ok at him pretty
hard before we shall recognize him.

The calicot season is at an end. The young dandy now wears a long
overcoat reaching to the knee, buttoned by broad pendant gew-gaws, with
stiff, inexpressibly high-reaching boots. There is no longer the trace
of a moustache; it has been supplanted by whiskers, of a provocative
description, extending from the ears to the nose, and quite changing the
character of the face. The hair is parted, smoothed in the middle, and
pressed down from the top by a frightful sort of thing, which they
called _chapeau a la Bolivar_, a hat with so broad a rim that it could
serve just as well as an umbrella.

This was Abellino Karpathy.

The banker's staircases and antechambers are swarming with hosts of lazy
loafers strutting about in the silvered liveries of lackeys, who hand
the arriving guests on from one to the other, and deprive them on
entering of their overcoats, sticks, hats, and gloves, which they have
to redeem on their return in exchange for liberal _pour-boires_. These
worthy bread-wasters know Abellino of old, for Hungarian magnates are
well aware that it is especially necessary in foreign lands to keep up
the national dignity in the eyes of domestics, and here is only one way
of doing this, _i.e._ by scattering your money right and left, parting
with your guineas, in fact, every time you have a glass of water or drop
your pocket-handkerchief. You know, of course, that a really elegant
cavalier never carries any sort of money about with him short of
guineas, and these, too, must be fresh from the mint, and well sprinkled
with eau de Cologne or some other perfume, so as to be free from the
soil of vulgar hands.

In an instant Abellino's cloak, cap, and cane were wrested from him, the
servants rang to each other, and ran from apartment to apartment, and
the cavalier had scarce reached the last door when the first courier
came running back with the announcement that Monsieur Griffard was ready
to receive him, and with that he threw open the wings of the lofty
mahogany folding-door which led into Monsieur Griffard's confidential
chamber.

There sat Monsieur Griffard surrounded by a heap of newspapers. In front
of the banker, on a little china porcelain table, stood a silver
tea-service, and from time to time he sipped from a half-filled saucer
some fluid or other, possibly a raw egg beaten up in tea and sweetened
by a peculiar sort of crystallized sugar, made from milk wh