is 'Hail fellow, well met!' with them
all. He says it answers at elections; I doubt it. I myself represent
a popular constituency, but I believe I owe my success in no slight
measure to the manner in which I gave my hand when I permitted it to be
touched. As I say sometimes to Mr. Tremaine Bertie, 'You will find
this habit of social familiarity embarrassing when I send you to St.
Petersburg or Vienna.'"

Waldershare dined there, now a peer, though, as he rejoiced to say,
not a peer of parliament. An Irish peer, with an English constituency,
filled, according to Waldershare, the most enviable of positions. His
rank gave him social influence, and his seat in the House of Commons
that power which all aspire to obtain. The cynosure of the banquet,
however, was a gentleman who had, about a year before, been the
president of a republic for nearly six weeks, and who being master of a
species of rhapsodical rhetoric, highly useful in troubled times, when
there is no real business to transact, and where there is nobody to
transact it, had disappeared when the treasury was quite empty, and
there were no further funds to reward the enthusiastic citizens who had
hitherto patriotically maintained order at wages about double in amount
to what they had previously received in their handicrafts. This great
reputation had been brought over by Mr. Tremaine Bertie, now introducing
him into English political society. Mr. Tremaine Bertie hung upon
the accents of the oracle, every word of which was intended to be
picturesque or profound, and then surveyed his friends with a glance of
appreciating wonder. Sensible Englishmen, like Endymion and Trenchard,
looked upon the whole exhibition as fustian, and received the
revelations with a smile of frigid courtesy.

The presence, however, of this celebrity of six weeks gave occasionally
a tone of foreign politics to the conversation, and the association of
ideas, which, in due course, rules all talk, brought them, among other
incidents and instances, to the remarkable career of King Florestan.

"And yet he has his mortifications," said a sensible man. "He wants a
wife, and the princesses of the world will not furnish him with one."

"What authority have you for saying so?" exclaimed the fiery
Waldershare. "The princesses of the world would be great fools if they
refused such a man, but I know of no authentic instance of such denial."

"Well, it is the common rumour."

"And, therefore, probably