ly private capacity, having
leisure to attend to personal concerns in the midst of the delicate
specialties intrusted to me from the cabinet at home, the possession of
so inestimable a valet might have bullied me beyond endurance. As it
was, I found it rather agreeable than otherwise. He was tacitly my
secretary of finance.

Several years ago, a diamond of wonderful size and beauty, having
wandered from the East, fell into certain imperial coffers among
our Continental neighbors; and at the same time some extraordinary
intelligence, essential to the existence, so to speak, of that
government, reached a person there who fixed as its price this diamond.
After a while he obtained it, but, judging that prudence lay in
departure, took it to England, where it was purchased for an enormous
sum by the Duke of ----, as he will remain an unknown quantity, let
us say X. There are probably not a dozen such diamonds in the
world,--certainly not three in England. It rejoiced in such flowery
appellatives as the Sea of Splendor, the Moon of Milk; and, of course,
those who had been scarcely better than jewed out of it were determined
to obtain it again at all hazards;--they were never famous for
scrupulosity. The Duke of X. was aware of this, and, for a time, the gem
had lain idle, its glory muffled in a casket; but finally, on some grand
occasion, a few months prior to the period of which I have spoken above,
it was determined to set it in the Duchess's coronet. Accordingly, one
day, it was given by her son, the Marquis of G., into the hands of their
solicitor, who should deliver it to her Grace's jeweller. It lay in a
small shagreen case, and, before the Marquis left, the solicitor placed
the case in a flat leathern box, where lay a chain of most singular
workmanship, the clasp of which was deranged. This chain was very broad,
of a style known as the brick-work, but every brick was a tiny gem, set
in a delicate filigree linked with the next, and the whole rainbowed
lustrousness moving at your will, like the scales of some gorgeous
Egyptian serpent:--the solicitor was to take this also to the jeweller.
Having laid the box in his private desk, Ulster, his confidential clerk,
locked it, while he bowed the Marquis down. Returning immediately, the
solicitor took the flat box and drove to the jeweller's. He found the
latter so crowded with customers, it being the fashionable hour, as to
be unable to attend to him; he, however, took the soli