ond de Rougemont.

Late that night I reached the waterside. The North River was ablaze with
red and blue lights, and rockets shot into the darkness from either
shore. Every ferry-boat, tug-boat, scow, or barge in the harbour passed
in an endless procession. The air quivered with the bellowings of
fog-horns, steam whistles, and sirens. It was indescribable; language
fails me. I can only quote the words of the New York paper with "the
largest circulation in the world": "The wind-whipped waters of river and
harbour glowed last night with the reflection of a myriad lights set
aflame for the glory of the new sound and golden dollar. East and west,
north and south, dazzling streams of fire played in fantastic curves
across the heavens, and beneath this canopy of streaming flame moved a
mammoth fleet of steam craft, great and small."

As I laid my aching head on my pillow I murmured: "Had I been an
American citizen, much as I believe in sound currency and an honest
dollar, one more rocket, a few more fog-horns, and I should have cast my
vote for Bryan and Free Silver!"

[Illustration: A SKETCH OF BOULANGER.]

At this dinner I contrasted the look of anxiety with the callous
indifference of a face I had watched under similar but still more unique
circumstances a few years before: the face of the chief of French
_poseurs_--General Boulanger--whom I was asked to meet at dinner in
London. It happened to be the night the result of his defeat at the
polls was made known. He sat, the one man out of the score-and-five
concerned; but as telegrams were handed to him, of defeat, not success,
he never showed any signs of interest.

A few years afterwards, when on tour with my lecture-entertainments, I
"put in" a week in the Channel Islands, under the management of a
gentleman who had been intimately acquainted with Boulanger when he was
a political recluse in Jersey; and one afternoon he drove me to the
charming villa the General had occupied, situated in an ideal spot on
the coast. The villa was most solidly built, and of picturesque
architecture--the freak of a rich Parisian merchant, who had spared no
pains or money over it. The work both inside and out was that of the
best artists Paris could supply. It was magnificently furnished--a
museum of beautiful objects, and curious ones, too. One bedroom was a
model of an officer's apartments on board a man-of-war, even to the
water (painted) splashing through a porthole. Another bedroom