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 lack 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 vivacious bewailer 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 gasbranches 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 café, 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

cloistered aisles, and the rich glow of Eastern waters, and the silent gloom of ancient God-forgotten cities; and, from out the waving, shadowy, changing darkness of all, there would have looked a woman's face, with fathomless, luminous eyes, and hair with a golden light upon it, and a proud, weary, sorceress smile on the lips-the face of a temptress or of an angel?

But the mirror had no magic of the future; the glass reflected nothing save the gas-jets of the ormolu sconces; and Fulke Erceldoune sat there in Paris that night, drinking his iced Rhine wines, and smoking his curled Arabian meerschaum, knowing nothing of what lay before him, a blind wanderer in the twilight, a traveller in strange countries, as we are at best in life.

CHAPTER III.

66 SOUFFRIR EN ROI.'

HEAVEN forbid that the Principalities should be better governed: they would be like all the rest of the world in no time. They may be ruinous to themselves very probably, and a nest of internecine discord for Eastern Europe; but they are delightful for the stranger, and the bird of passage should surely have one solitude left wherein to find rest; regions where the refined tortures of the post cannot reach; where debts can be defied and forgotten across the stretch of those dense pine-woods which sever you from the rest of mankind; where the only highway to your quarters is a rapid surging river, with a timber-raft drifting down it; where, whirled along by gipsy horses and gipsy drivers through vast wooded tracks, you halt and wake with a pleasant wonder to find yourself in the broad streets and squares of a populous city, of which, though you are not more geographically ignorant than your brethren,

you had not the haziest notion, and whose very name you do not know when you hear it, waking at the cessation of the horses' gallop and the gipsey Jehu's shouts, to open your eyes upon the clear Moldavian or Wallachian night, with the sound of music from some open casement above. Regions such as these are the Principalities, and who would not keep them so, from the Danube to the Dneister, from the Straits of Otranto to the Euxine, for the refuge of necessitous wanderers who have an inconvenient connection, a tiresome run upon them from the public, or a simple desire for a paradise where a woman will not follow them, where letters will not come, where the game districts are unbeaten, and the deep woods and wild valleys as yet unsketched and unsung?

Through the Principalities, Erceldoune travelled in as brief a time, from the early dawn when he had left Paris, as mail trains, express specials, rapid relays of horses, and swift river passages could take him, across Tyrol and Venetia, Alps and Carpa. thians, Danube and Drave, calling at Belgrade with despatches, and pushing straight on for Moldavia. Every mile of that wild and unworn way was as familiar to the Queen's Messenger as the journey between London and Paris is familiar to other men.

Where steam had not yet penetrated, and there was no choice but between posting and the saddle, he usually rode; if the roads were level, and the route unsighly, he would take the luxurious rest of a "Messenger's carriage," and post through the nights and days; but, by preference, hard riding carried him over most of his ground, with pace and stay that none in the service could equal, and which had made the Arabs, when their horses swept beside his through the eastern sunlight, toss their lances aloft, and shout, "Fazzia! Fazzia!" with applause to the Giaour. He rode so now, when, having passed direct from Belgrade across the lower angle of Transylvania, and crossed the Carpathian range, he found himself fairly set towards Moldavia, with only a hundred miles or so more left between him and Jassy, which was his destination.

The Principality was in ferment; Church and civil power were in conflict and rivalry; England, France, Austria, and Russia were all disturbing themselves after the affairs of this out-of-the-way nook, conceiving that with Greece in insurrection, and Italy in a transition state, and Poland quivering afresh beneath her bonds, even Moldavia might be the match to a European conflagration, and open up the scarce-healed Eastern question; and an