is the offspring of the African race--our slaves."

"With occasionally a Caucasian father," suggested the dowager
wickedly. "I have never seen this new idol of the ballet--Kora; but
her prettiness is the talk of the studios, though she does not deny
she came from your side of the sea, and has the shadows of Africa in
her hair."

"A quadroon or octoroon, no doubt. It appears strange to find the
outcasts of the States elected to that sort of notice over here--as
though the old world, tired of civilization and culture, turned for
distraction to the barbarians."

"Barbarians, indeed!" laughed the Countess Biron--the Countess Helene,
as she was called by her friends. She laughed a great deal, knew a
great deal, and never forgot a morsel of Parisian gossip. "This
barbarian has only to show herself on the boulevards and all good
citizens crane their necks for a glimpse of her. The empress herself
attracts less attention."

The dowager clicked the lid of her snuff box and shrugged her
shoulders.

"That Spanish woman--tah! As _Mademoiselle d'Industrie_ I do not see
why she should claim precedence. The blonde Spaniard is no more
beautiful than the brown American."

"For all that, Louis Napoleon has placed her among the elect,"
remarked the Countess Helene, with a mischievous glance towards the
Marquise, each understanding that the mention of the Second Empire was
like a call to war, in that salon.

"Louis!" and the dowager shrugged her shoulder, and made a gesture of
contempt. "That accident! What is he that any one should be exalted by
his favor? Mademoiselle de Montijo was--for the matter of that--his
superior! Her family had place and power; her paternity was
undisputed; but this Louis--tah! There was but one Bonaparte; that
subaltern from Corsica; that meteor. He was, with all his faults, a
worker, a thinker, an original. He would have swept into the sea the
envious islanders across the channel to whom this Bonaparte
truckled--this man called Bonaparte, who was no Bonaparte at all--a
vulture instead of an eagle!"

So exclaimed the dowager, who carried in her memory the picture of the
streets of Paris when neither women nor children were spared by the
bullets and sabres of his slaughterers--the hyena to whom the clergy
so bowed down that not a mass for the dead patriots could be secured
in Paris, from either priest or archbishop, and the Republicans piled
in the streets by hundreds!

Mrs. McVeigh turned in some di