by Charles Miste--whoever he may have been.

"And what, sir, is to become of me?" inquired my servant, when I
instructed him to pack my clothes and made known to him my movements
in the immediate future. I had forgotten Loomer. A secretary could
scarcely come into residence attended by a valet, rejoicing in the
usual direct or indirect emoluments, and possessing that abnormal
appetite which only belongs to the man servant living in the kitchen.
I told him, therefore, that his future was entirely his own, and that
while his final fate was unquestionable, the making of his earthly
career remained, for the present, in his own hands. In fact, I gave
him permission to commence at once his descent to that bourne whither,
I feared, his footsteps would tend.

Mr. Loomer was good enough to evince signs of emotion, and from a
somewhat confused speech, I gathered that he refused to go to Avernus
until he could make the journey in my service and at my heels.
Ultimately it was agreed, however, that he should seek a temporary
situation--he was a man of many talents, and as handy in the stable as
in a gentleman's dressing-room--and remain therein until I should
require his services again. As it happened, I had sufficient ready
cash to pay him his wages, with an additional sum to compensate for
the brevity of his notice to quit a sorry service. He took the money
without surprise. It is surely a sign of good breeding to receive
one's due with no astonishment.

"Can't you keep me on, sir?" he pleaded a last time, when I had proved
by a gift of a pair of hunting boots (which were too small for me)
that we really were about to part.

"My good Loomer, I am going into service myself. I always said I could
black a boot better than you."

As I left the room I heard the worthy domestic mutter something about
"pretty work," and "a Howard of Hopton," and made no doubt that he
regretted less the fall of my ancestral dignity than the loss to
himself of a careless and easily robbed master. At all events I had
been under the impression that I possessed a fuller store of linen
than that which emerged from my travel-stained trunks when these were
unpacked later in the day in the Rue des Palmiers.

As for that matter of ancestral dignity, it gave me no trouble. Such a
possession comes, I think, to little harm while a man keeps it in his
own hands, and only falls to pieces when it gets into the grasp of a
bad woman. Have we not seen half a dozen,