head
at every point. When it came to the name, he turned to his books, and
shook his head yet more impressively. Then he took down a letter,
spelled its address, and handed it to the colonel; it was his own note
to Mrs. Kenton. That quite crushed him. He looked at it in a dull,
mechanical way, and nodded his head with compressed lips. Then he
scanned the portier, and glanced round once more at the bedevilled
architecture. "Well," said he, at last, "there's a mistake somewhere.
Unless there are two Kaiserin Elisabeths--. Davis, ask him if there are
two Kaiserin Elisabeths."

The consul compassionately put the question, received with something
like grief by the portier. Impossible!

"Then I'm not stopping at either of them," continued the colonel. "So
far, so good,--if you want to call it _good_. The question is now, if
I'm not stopping at the Kaiserin Elisabeth," he demanded, with sudden
heat, and raising his voice, "how the devil did I get there?"

The consul at this broke into a fit of laughter so violent that the
portier retired a pace or two from these maniacs, and took up a safe
position within his doorway. "You didn't--you didn't--get there!"
shrieked the consul. "That's what made the whole trouble. You--you meant
well, but you got somewhere else." He took out his handkerchief and
wiped the tears from his eyes.

The colonel did not laugh; he had no real pleasure in the joke. On the
contrary, he treated it as a serious business. "Very well," said he, "it
will be proved next that I never told that driver to take me to the
Kaiserin Elisabeth, as it appears that I never got there and am not
stopping there. Will you be good enough to tell me," he asked, with
polished sarcasm, "where I _am_ stopping, and why, and how?'

"I wish with all my heart I could," gasped his friend, catching his
breath, "but I can't, and the only way is to go round to the principal
hotels till we hit the right one. It won't take long. Come!" He passed
his arm through that of the colonel, and made an explanation to the
portier, as if accounting for the vagaries of some harmless eccentric he
had in charge. Then he pulled his friend gently away, who yielded after
a survey of the portier and the court-yard with a frown in which an
indignant sense of injury quite eclipsed his former bewilderment. He had
still this defiant air when they came to the next hotel, and used the
portier with so much severity on finding that he was not stopping there,
e