ly now no longer infallible or
divine.

"Yes," continues Father Holt, or Captain von Holtz, "for a man who has
not been in England these eight years, I know what goes on in London
very well. The old Dean is dead, my Lady Castlewood's father. Do you
know that your recusant bishops wanted to consecrate him Bishop
of Southampton, and that Collier is Bishop of Thetford by the same
imposition? The Princess Anne has the gout and eats too much; when the
King returns, Collier will be an archbishop."

"Amen!" says Esmond, laughing; "and I hope to see your Eminence no
longer in jack-boots, but red stockings, at Whitehall."

"You are always with us--I know that--I heard of that when you were at
Cambridge; so was the late lord; so is the young viscount."

"And so was my father before me," said Mr. Esmond, looking calmly at the
other, who did not, however, show the least sign of intelligence in his
impenetrable gray eyes--how well Harry remembered them and their look!
only crows' feet were wrinkled round them--marks of black old Time had
settled there.

Esmond's face chose to show no more sign of meaning than the Father's.
There may have been on the one side and the other just the faintest
glitter of recognition, as you see a bayonet shining out of an ambush;
but each party fell back, when everything was again dark.

"And you, mon capitaine, where have you been?" says Esmond, turning
away the conversation from this dangerous ground, where neither chose to
engage.

"I may have been in Pekin," says he, "or I may have been in
Paraguay--who knows where? I am now Captain von Holtz, in the service of
his Electoral Highness, come to negotiate exchange of prisoners with his
Highness of Savoy."

'Twas well known that very many officers in our army were well-affected
towards the young king at St. Germains, whose right to the throne was
undeniable, and whose accession to it, at the death of his sister, by
far the greater part of the English people would have preferred, to
the having a petty German prince for a sovereign, about whose cruelty,
rapacity, boorish manners, and odious foreign ways, a thousand stories
were current. It wounded our English pride to think that a shabby
High-Dutch duke, whose revenues were not a tithe as great as those of
many of the princes of our ancient English nobility, who could not speak
a word of our language, and whom we chose to represent as a sort
of German boor, feeding on train-oil and sour-crout, w