, now forgotten, and in various receptions and
dinners, still actively remembered by occasional visits to its salon;
now the average dreary American parlor. "Dear me," the fascinating Mr. X
would say, "but do you know, love, in this very room I remember meeting
the distinguished Marquis of Monte Pio;" or perhaps the fashionable
Jones of the State Department instantly crushed the decayed friend he
was perfunctorily visiting by saying, "'Pon my soul, YOU here;--why, the
last time I was in this room I gossiped for an hour with the Countess
de Castenet in that very corner." For, with the recall of the aforesaid
Ambassador, the mansion had become a boarding-place, kept by the wife of
a departmental clerk.

Perhaps there was nothing in the history of the house more quaint and
philosophic than the story of its present occupant. Roger Fauquier had
been a departmental clerk for forty years. It was at once his practical
good luck and his misfortune to have been early appointed to a position
which required a thorough and complete knowledge of the formulas and
routine of a department that expended millions of the public funds.
Fauquier, on a poor salary, diminishing instead of increasing with his
service, had seen successive administrations bud and blossom and decay,
but had kept his position through the fact that his knowledge was a
necessity to the successive chiefs and employes. Once it was true that
he had been summarily removed by a new Secretary, to make room for a
camp follower, whose exhaustive and intellectual services in a political
campaign had made him eminently fit for anything; but the alarming
discovery that the new clerk's knowledge of grammar and etymology
was even worse than that of the Secretary himself, and that, through
ignorance of detail, the business of that department was retarded to a
damage to the Government of over half a million of dollars, led to the
reinstatement of Mr. Fauquier--AT A LOWER SALARY. For it was felt that
something was wrong somewhere, and as it had always been the custom of
Congress and the administration to cut down salaries as the first step
to reform, they made of Mr. Fauquier a moral example. A gentleman born,
of somewhat expensive tastes, having lived up to his former salary, this
change brought another bread-winner into the field, Mrs. Fauquier, who
tried, more or less unsuccessfully, to turn her old Southern habits of
hospitality to remunerative account. But as poor Fauquier could