ege friend, of birth
inferior to his own, had been as unfortunate in seeking to make money as
this young prodigal had been an adept in spending it. The friend, a
few years previously, had accompanied other Germans in a migration to
Australia, and was already thriving; the spendthrift noble was on his
way to join the bankrupt trader, at a German settlement fifty miles
distant from my house. This young man was unlike any German I ever met.
He had all the exquisite levity by which the well-bred Frenchman gives
to the doctrines of the Cynic the grace of the Epicurean. He owned
himself to be good for nothing with an elegance of candour which not
only disarmed censure, but seemed to challenge admiration; and, withal,
the happy spendthrift was so inebriate with hope,--sure that he should
be rich before he was thirty. How and wherefore rich, he could have
no more explained than I can square the circle. When the grand serious
German nature does Frenchify itself, it can become so extravagantly
French!

I listened, almost enviously, to this light-hearted profligate's babble,
as we sat by my rude fireside,--I, sombre man of science and sorrow,
he, smiling child of idleness and pleasure, so much one of Nature's
courtier-like nobles, that there, as he smoked his villanous pipe, in
his dust-soiled shabby garments, and with his ruffianly revolver stuck
into his belt, I would defy the daintiest Aristarch who ever presided as
critic over the holiday world not to have said, "There smiles the
genius beyond my laws, the born darling of the Graces, who in every
circumstance, in every age, like Aristippus, would have socially
charmed; would have been welcome to the orgies of a Caesar or a Clodius,
to the boudoirs of a Montespan or a Pompadour; have lounged through the
Mulberry Gardens with a Rochester and a Buckingham, or smiled from the
death-cart, with a Richelieu and a Lauzun, a gentleman's disdain of a
mob!"

I was so thinking as we sat, his light talk frothing up from his
careless lips, when suddenly from the spray and the sparkle of that
light talk was flung forth the name of Margrave.

"Margrave!" I exclaimed. "Pardon me. What of him?"

"What of him! I asked if, by chance, you knew the only Englishman I ever
had the meanness to envy?"

"Perhaps you speak of one person, and I thought of another."

"Pardieu, my dear host, there can scarcely be two Margraves! The one of
whom I speak flashed like a meteor upon Paris, bought from a p