g
bard or the tadpole litterateur, awaiting the pleasure and sentence of
the august editor or the puissant publisher. Tortier had been suddenly
exalted to the judge's lofty pedestal. Would he forthwith be an
imperial autocrat; turn tyrant or Thersites; or become critic, one of
"those graminivorous animals which gain subsistence by gorging upon
buds and leaves of the young shrubs of the forest, robbing them of
their verdure and retarding their progress to maturity"?

Straws' anxiety was trouble's labor lost. Celestina appeared, the glad
messenger of success, and now, as she came dancing into the room, bore
in her arms the fruits of victory which she laid before the poet with
sparkling eyes and laughing lips.

"So the poem was accepted?" murmured Straws. "Discerning Tortier!
Excellent dilettante! Let him henceforth be known as a man of taste!"
Here the poet critically examined the bottle. "Nothing vapid, thin or
characterless there!" he added, holding it before the blaze in the
grate. "Positively I'll dedicate my forthcoming book to him. 'To that
worshipful master and patron, the tasteful Tortier!' What did he say,
Celestina, when you tendered him the poem?"

"At first he frowned and then he looked thoughtful. And then he gave
me some orange syrup. And then--O, I don't want to say!" A look of
unutterable concern displacing the happiness on her features.

"Say on, my dear!" cried Straws.

"He--he said he--he didn't think much of it as--O, I can't tell you; I
can't! I can't!"

"Celestina," said the poet sternly, "tell me at once. I command you."

"He said he didn't think much of it as poetry, but that people would
read it and come to his _cafe_ and--O dear, O dear!"

"Beast! Brute! Parvenu! But there, don't cry, my dear. We have much to
be thankful for--we have the bottle."

"Oh, yes," she said with conviction, and brightening a bit. "We have
the bottle." And as she spoke, "pop" it went, and Celestina laughed.
"May I set your table?" she asked.

"After your inestimable service to me, my dear, I find it impossible
to refuse," he replied gravely.

"How good you are!" she remarked, placing a rather soiled cloth, which
she found somewhere, over a battered trunk.

"I try not to be, but I can't help it!" answered the poet modestly.

"No; that's it; you can't help it!" she returned, moving lightly
around the room, emptying the contents of the frying-pan--now an
aromatic jumble--on to a cracked blue platter, and set