t still it seemed to speak of impending dangers, which Frank,
though he could not understand them, thought that he could perceive.

My present engagement is to go on till the end of July,
with an understanding that I am to have twenty guineas
a night, for any evening that I may be required to sing
in August. This your highness will perceive is a very
considerable increase, and at three nights a week might
afford an income on which your highness would perhaps
condescend to come and eat a potato, in the honour of
"ould" Ireland, till better times should come. That would
be the happy potato which would be the first bought for
such a purpose! But you must see that I cannot expect
a continuance of my present engagement as the head of
your royal highness' seraglio. I should have to look for
another Chancellor of the Exchequer, and should probably
find him. Mr. Mahomet M. Moss would hardly endure me
as being part of the properties belonging to your royal
highness.

And now I must tell you my own little news. Beelzebub has
taken a worse devil to himself, so that I am likely to be
trodden down into the very middle of the pit. I choose to
tell you because I won't have you think that I have ever
kept anything secret from you. If I describe the roars of
Mrs. Beelzebub to you, and her red claws, and her forky
tongue, and her fiery tail, it is not because I like her
as a subject of poetry, but because this special subject
comes uppermost; and you shall never say to me, why didn't
you tell me when you were introduced to Beelzebub's wife?
and assert, as men are apt to do, that you would not
have allowed me to make her acquaintance. Mrs. Beelzebub
appears on the stage as belonging to Mahomet but how they
have mixed it all up together among themselves, I do not
quite know. I do not think that they're in love with one
another, because she is not jealous of me. She is Madame
Socani in the plot, and a genuine American from New York;
but she can sing; she has a delicious soprano voice, soft
and powerful; but she has also a temper and temperament
such as no woman, nor yet no devil, ought to possess. Of
Monsieur Socani, or Signor Socani, or Herr Socani, I never
yet heard. But such men do not always make themselves
troublesome. I have to sing with her, and a woman you may
say would not be troublesome, but she and Mahom