order would make them invaluable in a Chancellerie, and fit them for any State office in the world."
The First Secretary of the English Legation and a French diplomatist entered and claimed his attention at that instant, and he gave no more thought to the champion of the crystallised flowers, whom, justly or wrongly as it might chance, he had classed with the renowned Legion of Chevaliers d’Industrie, and whose somewhat abrupt departure he had attributed either to his own hick of promise as a plausible subject for experimentalising upon, or to the appearance on the scene of some mouchard of the Secret Bureau, whom the yiracions bewHiler of the fate of sugared violets in this age of prose did not care to encounter.
Erceldoune thought no more of him then and thenceforward: he would have thought more had the mirrors of the Café Minuit been Paracelsus' or Agrippa's mirours of grammarye.
The long console-glass, with its curled gas-branches and its rose-hued draperies, and its reflex of the gilding, the glitter, the silver, the damask, the fruit, the wines, and the crowds of the Paris cafe, would have been darkened with night-shadows and deep forest foliage, and the tumult of close struggles for life or death, and the twilight hush of
