ke to have seen the man--or, still more,
the woman--who would n't have believed him.

The turf--like poverty--teaches one to know strange bed-fellows; and
this will explain how the Count and Grog Davis became acquaintances, and
something more.

The grand intelligence who discovered the great financial problem of
France--the _Credit Mobilier_--has proclaimed to the world that the
secret lay in the simple fact that there were industrial energies which
needed capital, and capital which needed industry, and that all he
avowed to accomplish was to bring these two distant but all necessary
elements into close union and co-operation. Now, something of the same
kind moved Grog and the Count to cement their friendship; each saw that
the other supplied some want of his own nature, and before they had
passed an hour together they ratified an alliance. An instinct
whispered to each, "We are going the same journey in life, let us travel
together;" and some very profitable tours did they make in company!

His presence now was on a special mission from Davis, whom he just met
at Treves, and who despatched him to request his daughter to come on to
Carlsruhe, where he would await her. The Count was charged to explain,
in some light easy way of his own, why her father had left Brussels so
abruptly; and he was also instructed to take Annesley Beecher into
his holy keeping, and not suffer him to fall into indiscretions, or
adventure upon speculations of his own devising.

Lizzy thought him "charming,"--far more worldly-wise people than Lizzy
had often thought the same. There was a bubbling fountain of good-humor
about him that seemed inexhaustible. He was always ready for any plan
that promised pleasure. Unlike Beecher, who knew nobody, the Count
walked the street in a perpetual salutation,--bowing, hand-shaking,
and sometimes kissing, as he went; and in that strange polyglot that
he talked he murmured as he went, "Ah, lieber Freund!"--"Come
sta?"--"Addio!"--"Mon meilleur ami!" to each that passed; so that
veritably the world did seem only peopled with those who loved him.

As for Beecher, notwithstanding a certain distrust at the beginning,
he soon fell captive to a manner that few resisted; and though the
intercourse was limited to shaking hands and smiling at each other, the
Count's pleasant exclamation of "All right!" with a jovial slap on the
shoulder, made him feel that he was a "regular trump," and a man "to
depend on."

One