Cartoner.

Deulin held up one hand in a gesture commanding silence.

"Not another word--they cost you so much, a few words--I understand
perfectly."

Then with a rapid relapse into his gayer mood he turned to the dish
before him.

"And now let us consider the railway beef. It promises little. But it
cannot be so tough and indigestible as the memory of a mistake--I tell
you that."

XXX

THE QUIET CITY

The most liberal-minded man in Russia at this time was the Czar. He had
chosen his ministers from among the nobles who were at least tolerant of
advance, if they did not actually advocate it. Much as he hated to make
a change, he had in one or two instances parted with old and trusted
servants--friends of his boyhood--rather than forgo one item of his
policy. In other cases he had appealed to the memory of their long
friendship in order to bring his nobles not to his own way of thinking,
for he could not do that, but to his own plan of action.

"I do not agree with you, but I will serve you," had answered one of
these, and the Czar, who did not know where to turn to find the man he
needed, accepted such service.

For a throne stands in isolation, and no man may judge another by
looking down upon him, but must needs descend into the crowd, and,
mingling there on a lower level, pick out for himself the honest man or
the clever man--or that rare being, the man who is both.

Kings and emperors may not do this, however. Despots dare not. Alexander
II. acted as any ordinary man acts when he finds himself in a position
to confer favors, to make appointments, to get together, as it were, a
ministry, even if this takes no more dignified a form than a board of
directors. He suspected that the world contained precisely the men he
wanted, if he could only let down a net into it and draw them up. How,
otherwise, could he select them? So he did the usual thing. He looked
round among his relations, and, failing them, the friends of his youth.
For an emperor, popularly supposed to have the whole world to choose
from, has no larger a choice than any bourgeois looking round his own
small world for a satisfactory executor.

Coming to the throne, as he did, in the midst of a losing fight, his
first task was to conclude a humiliating peace. He must needs bow down
to the upstart adventurer of France, who had tricked England into a
useless war in order to steady his own tottering throne.

Alexander II., moreover, came to po