radiant with diamond buckles, doublets of as many different shades as
their tights, slashed with satin and embroidered with gold. Most of them
wore huge powdered wigs, according to the hideous fashion then in vogue,
and under those same ugly scalps, laughed many a handsome face Sir
Norman well knew. The majority of those richly-robed gallants were
strangers to him as well as the ladies, but whoever they were, whether
mortal men or "spirits from the vasty deep," they were in the tallest
sort of clover just then. Evidently they knew it, too, and seemed to be
on the best of terms with themselves and all the world, and laughed,
and flirted, and flattered, with as much perfection as so many ball-room
Apollos of the present day.

Still no one ascended the golden and crimson throne, though many of the
ladies and gentlemen fluttering about it were arrayed as royally as any
common king or queen need wish to be. They promenaded up and down, arm
in arm; they seated themselves in the carved and gilded chairs; they
gathered in little groups to talk and laugh, did everything, in short,
but ascend the throne; and the solitary spectator up above began to grow
intensely curious to know who it was for. Their conversation he could
plainly hear, and to say that it amazed him, would be to use a feeble
expression, altogether inadequate to his feelings. Not that it was the
remarks they made that gave his system each a shook, but the names by
which they addressed each other. One answered to the aspiring cognomen
of the Duke of Northumberland; another was the Earl of Leicester;
another, the Duke of Devonshire; another, the Earl of Clarendon;
another, the Duke of Buckingham; and so on, ad infinitum, dukes and
earls alternately, like bricks and mortar in the wall of a house.
There were other dignitaries besides, some that Sir Norman had a faint
recollection of hearing were dead for some years--Cardinal Wolsey,
Sir Thomas More, the Earl of Bothwell, King Henry Darnley, Sir Walter
Raleigh, the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Southampton, the Duke of York,
and no end of others with equally sonorous titles. As for mere lords and
baronets, and such small deer, there was nothing so plebeian present,
and they were evidently looked upon by the distinguished assembly, like
small deer in thunder, with pity and contempt. The ladies, too, were all
duchesses, marchionesses, countesses, and looked fit for princesses,
Sir Norman thought, though he heard none of th