eless, astounded at
the mere multitudinousness of the curios he had contrived to crowd into
the space around him. Side by side rested a palaeolithic implement, a
Chinese 'wise man,' a Gnostic gem, an amphora of Graeco-Etruscan work.
The general effect was a _bizarrerie_ of half-weird sheen and gloom.
Flemish sepulchral brasses companied strangely with runic tablets,
miniature paintings, a winged bull, Tamil scriptures on lacquered
leaves of the talipot, mediaeval reliquaries richly gemmed, Brahmin
gods. One whole side of the room was occupied by an organ whose thunder
in that circumscribed place must have set all these relics of dead
epochs clashing and jingling in fantastic dances. As I entered, the
vaporous atmosphere was palpitating to the low, liquid tinkling of an
invisible musical box. The prince reclined on a couch from which a
draping of cloth-of-silver rolled torrent over the floor. Beside him,
stretched in its open sarcophagus which rested on three brazen
trestles, lay the mummy of an ancient Memphian, from the upper part of
which the brown cerements had rotted or been rent, leaving the
hideousness of the naked, grinning countenance exposed to view.

Discarding his gemmed chibouque and an old vellum reprint of Anacreon,
Zaleski rose hastily and greeted me with warmth, muttering at the same
time some commonplace about his 'pleasure' and the 'unexpectedness' of
my visit. He then gave orders to Ham to prepare me a bed in one of the
adjoining chambers. We passed the greater part of the night in a
delightful stream of that somnolent and half-mystic talk which Prince
Zaleski alone could initiate and sustain, during which he repeatedly
pressed on me a concoction of Indian hemp resembling _hashish_,
prepared by his own hands, and quite innocuous. It was after a simple
breakfast the next morning that I entered on the subject which was
partly the occasion of my visit. He lay back on his couch, volumed in a
Turkish _beneesh_, and listened to me, a little wearily perhaps at
first, with woven fingers, and the pale inverted eyes of old anchorites
and astrologers, the moony greenish light falling on his always wan
features.

'You knew Lord Pharanx?' I asked.

'I have met him in "the world." His son Lord Randolph, too, I saw once
at Court at Peterhof, and once again at the Winter Palace of the Tsar.
I noticed in their great stature, shaggy heads of hair, ears of a very
peculiar conformation, and a certain aggressiveness of