vial
sons of the north, and "healths bottle-deep" were sent round the board
with rapid circulation.

My entrance but slightly deranged the symposium, and I was soon
furnished with all the freemasonry of the feast, by being called on to
do honour to the toast of "His Majesty the King of Great Britain." My
duty was now done, my initiation was complete, and while my eyes were
fixed on the portrait which, still in its unharmed beauty, looked
beaming on the wild revel below, I heard, in the broken queries, and
interjectional panegyrics of these hyperborean heroes, more of the
history of Lafayette than I had ever expected to reach my ears.

His life had been the strangest contrast to the calm countenance which
I saw so tranquilly listen to its own tale. It was Quixotic, and two
hundred years ago could scarcely have escaped the pen of some French
Cervantes. He had begun life as an officer in the French household
troops in absolute boyhood. At sixteen he had married! at eighteen he
had formed his political principles, and begun his military career by
crossing the Atlantic, and offering his sword to the Republic. To meet
the thousand wonderings at his conduct, he exchanged the ancient motto
of the Lafayettes for a new one of his own. The words, "Why not?" were
his answer to all, and they were sufficient. On reaching America, he
asked but two favours, to be suffered to serve, and to serve without
pay.

In America he was more republican than the Republicans. He toiled,
traveled, and bled, with an indefatigable zeal for the independence of
the colonists; his zeal was a passion, his love of liberty a romance,
his hostility to the dominion of England an universal scorn of
established power. But if fantastic, he was bold; and if too hot for
the frigidity of America, he was but preparing to touch France with
kindred fire. He refused rank in the French army coupled with the
condition of leaving the service of the Republic; and it was only on
the French alliance in 1788 that he returned to Paris, to be received
with feigned displeasure by the King, and even put under arrest by the
minister, but to be welcomed by the praises of the true sovereign, the
Queen, feted by the court, the sovereign of that sovereign, and
huzzaed by the mob of Paris, already the sovereign of them all; from
his military prison he emerged, colonel of the King's regiment of
dragoons.

While this narrative was going on, mingled with bumpers, and bursts of
Slavo