them, got friends over a mutually good book on the
Rastadt or Foret Noir. Brains that were the powder depot of one-half of
the universe let themselves be lulled to tranquil amusement by a fair
idiot's coquetry. And lips that, with a whisper, could loosen the
coursing slips of the wild hell-dogs of war, murmured love to a
princess, led the laugh at a supper at five in the morning, or smiled
over their own caricatures done by Tenniel or Cham.

Baden was full. The supreme empires of demi-monde sent their sovereigns,
diamond-crowned and resistless, to outshine all other principalities and
powers, while in breadth of marvelous skirts, in costliness of cobweb
laces, in unapproachability of Indian shawls and gold embroideries,
and mad fantasies and Cleopatra extravagances, and jewels fit for a
Maharajah, the Zu-Zu was distanced by none.

Among the kings and heroes and celebrities who gathered under the
pleasant shadow of the pine-crowned hills, there was not one in his way
greater than the steeple-chaser, Forest King--certes, there was not one
half so honest.

The Guards' Crack was entered for the Prix de Dames, the sole
representative of England. There were two or three good things out of
French stables,--specially a killing little boy, L'Etoile,--and there
was an Irish sorrel, the property of an Austrian of rank, of which fair
things were whispered; but it was scarcely possible that anything
could stand against the King and that wonderful stride of his which
spread-eagled his field like magic, and his countrymen were well
content to leave their honor and their old renown to "Beauty" and his
six-year-old.

Beauty himself, with a characteristic philosophy, had a sort of
conviction that the German race would set everything square. He stood
either to make a very good thing on it or to be very heavily bit. There
could be no medium. He never hedged in his life; and as it was almost
a practical impossibility that anything the foreign stables could get
together would even be able to land within half a dozen lengths of
the King. Cecil, always willing to console himself, and invariably too
careless to take the chance of adverse accident into account, had come
to Baden, and was amusing himself there dropping a Friedrich d'Or on the
rouge, flirting in the shady alleys of the Lichtenthal, waltzing Lady
Guenevere down the ballroom, playing ecarte with some Serene Highness,
supping with the Zu-Zu and her set, and occupying rooms that