chair impatiently back, and said:--"This place smells like a
kitchen. Will you come out, and have a cigar?"

So we rose, took our hats, and in a few moments were strolling under the
lindens on the Quai de Corneille.

I, of course, had never smoked in my life; and, humiliating though it
was, found myself obliged to decline a "prime Havana," proffered in the
daintiest of embroidered cigar-cases. My companion looked as if he
pitied me. "You'll soon learn," said he. "A man can't live in Paris
without tobacco. Do you stay there many weeks?"

"Two years, at least," I replied, registering an inward resolution to
conquer the difficulties of tobacco without delay. "I am going to study
medicine under an eminent French surgeon."

"Indeed! Well, you could not go to a better school, or embrace a nobler
profession. I used to think a soldier's life the grandest under heaven;
but curing is a finer thing than killing, after all! What a delicious
evening, is it not? If one were only in Paris, now, or Vienna,...."

"What, Oscar Dalrymple!" exclaimed a voice close beside us. "I should as
soon have expected to meet the great Panjandrum himself!"

"--With the little round button at top," added my companion, tossing
away the end of his cigar, and shaking hands heartily with the
new-comer. "By Jove, Frank, I'm glad to see you! What brings you here?"

"Business--confound it! And not pleasant business either. _A proces_
which my father has instituted against a great manufacturing firm here
at Rouen, and of which I have to bear the brunt. And you?"

"And I, my dear fellow? Pshaw! what should I be but an idler in search
of amusement?"

"Is it true that you have sold out of the Enniskillens?"

"Unquestionably. Liberty is sweet; and who cares to carry a sword in
time of peace? Not I, at all events."

While this brief greeting was going forward, I hung somewhat in the
rear, and amused myself by comparing the speakers. The new-comer was
rather below than above the middle height, fair-haired and boyish, with
a smile full of mirth and an eye full of mischief. He looked about two
years my senior. The other was much older--two or three and thirty, at
the least--dark, tall, powerful, finely built; his wavy hair clipped
close about his sun-burnt neck; a thick moustache of unusual length; and
a chest that looked as if it would have withstood the shock of a
battering-ram. Without being at all handsome, there was a look of
brightness, and boldness,