the damaging
admission to others that he lived several years in Rome! And," continued
the inspector, looking over his shoulder at the closed door as he placed
his finger beside his nose, "he says he has relations living
at Palmyra, whom he frequently visited. Ach! Observe this
unheard-of-and-not-to-be-trusted statement!"

The consul, however, smiled with a slight flash of intelligence. "Let me
see him," he said.

They passed into the outer office; another policeman and a corporal of
infantry saluted and rose. In the centre of an admiring and sympathetic
crowd of Dienstmadchen sat the culprit, the least concerned of the
party; a stripling--a boy--scarcely out of his teens! Indeed, it was
impossible to conceive of a more innocent, bucolic, and almost angelic
looking derelict. With a skin that had the peculiar white and rosiness
of fresh pork, he had blue eyes, celestially wide open and staring, and
the thick flocculent yellow curls of the sun god! He might have been
an overgrown and badly dressed Cupid who had innocently wandered from
Paphian shores. He smiled as the consul entered, and wiped from his
full red lips with the back of his hand the traces of a sausage he was
eating. The consul recognized the flavor at once,--he had smelled it
before in Lieschen's little hand-basket.

"You say you lived at Rome?" began the consul pleasantly. "Did you take
out your first declaration of your intention of becoming an American
citizen there?"

The inspector cast an approving glance at the consul, fixed a stern eye
on the cherubic prisoner, and leaned back in his chair to hear the reply
to this terrible question.

"I don't remember," said the culprit, knitting his brows in infantine
thought. "It was either there, or at Madrid or Syracuse."

The inspector was about to rise; this was really trifling with the
dignity of the municipality. But the consul laid his hand on the
official's sleeve, and, opening an American atlas to a map of the State
of New York, said to the prisoner, as he placed the inspector's hand on
the sheet, "I see you know the names of the TOWNS on the Erie and New
York Central Railroad. But"--

"I can tell you the number of people in each town and what are the
manufactures," interrupted the young fellow, with youthful vanity.
"Madrid has six thousand, and there are over sixty thousand in"--

"That will do," said the consul, as a murmur of Wunderschon! went round
the group of listening servant girls, while