le, the
fellows who--like myself--know the whole thing, never write! Have n't
you often remarked that a man who has passed years of life in a foreign
city loses all power of depicting its traits of peculiarity, just
because, from habit, they have ceased to strike him as strange? So it
is. Your thorough man of the world knows life too well to describe it.
No, no; it is the creature that stands furtively in the flats that can
depict what goes on in the comedy. Who are your guests?"

Mark ran over the names carelessly.

"All new to me, and I to them. Don't introduce me, Mark; leave me to
shake down in any bivouac that may offer. I'll not be a bear if people
don't bait me. You understand?"

"Perhaps I do."

"There are no foreigners? That's a loss. They season society, though
they never make it, and there's an evasive softness in French that
contributes much to the courtesies of life. So it is; the habits of the
Continent to the wearied man of the world are just like loose slippers
to a gouty man. People learn to be intimate there without being
over-familiar,--a great point, Mark."

"By the way,--talking of that same familiarity,--there was a young
fellow who got the habit of coming here, before I returned from India,
on such easy terms that I found him installed like one of ourselves. He
had his room, his saddle-horse, a servant that waited on him, and who
did his orders, as if he were a son of the family. I cut the thing very
short when I came home, by giving him a message to do some trifling
service, just as I would have told my valet. He resented, left the
house, and sent me this letter next morning."

"Not much given to letter-writing, I see," muttered Mait-land, as he
read over Tony's epistle; "but still the thing is reasonably well put,
and means to say, 'Give me a chance, and I 'm ready for you.' What's the
name,--Buller?"

"No; Butler,--Tony Butler they call him here."

"What Butlers does he belong to?" asked Maitland, with more interest in
his manner.

"No Butlers at all,--at least, none of any standing. My sisters, who
swear by this fellow, will tell you that his father was a colonel and
C.B., and I don't know what else; and that his uncle was, and I believe
is, a certain Sir Omerod Butler, minister or ex-minister somewhere; but
I have my doubts of all the fine parentage, seeing that this youth lives
with his mother in a cottage here that stands in the rent-roll at L18
per annum."

"There is a Sir Om