so, Tascher, you deem me such a fortunate fellow?"

"That I do," replied he, quickly. "You have had more good luck, and made
less of it, than any one I ever knew. What a career you had before you
when we met first! There was that pretty girl at the Tuileries quite
ready to fall in love with you; I know it, because she rather took an
air of coldness with me. Well, you let her be carried off by an old
general, with a white head and a queue,--unquestionably a bit of pique
on her part. Then, somehow or other, you contrived to pink the best
swordsman of the army, little Francois there; and I never heard that the
circumstance gained you a single conquest."

"Quite true, my friend," said I, laughing; "I confess it all. And, what
is far worse, I acknowledge that until this moment I did not even know
the advantages I was wilfully wasting."

"And even now," continued he, not minding my interruption,--"even now,
you are about to return to Paris as one of the _elite_. Well, I 'll
wager twenty Naps that the only civil speeches you 'll hear will be from
some musty old senators at the Luxembourg. Oh dear! if my amiable aunt,
the Empress, would only induce my most benevolent uncle, the Emperor,
to put me on that same list, depend upon it you 'd hear of Lieutenant
Tascher in the 'Faubourg St. Honore.'"

"But you seem to forget," said I, half piqued at last by the
impertinence of his tone, "that I have neither friends nor
acquaintances; that, although a Frenchman by service, I am not so by
birth."

"And I,--what am I?" interrupted he. "A Creole, come from Heaven knows
what far-away place beyond seas; that there never was a man with
more expensive tastes, and smaller means to supply them,--with worse
prospects, and better connections; in short, a kind of live antithesis.
And yet, with all that, exchange places with me now, and see if, before
a fortnight elapse, I have not more dinner invitations than any officer
of the same grade within the Boulevards; watch if the prettiest girl
at Paris is not at my side in the Opera. But here comes your official
appointment, I take it."

As he said this, an orderly of the "Garde" delivered a sealed packet
into my hands, which, on opening, I discovered was a letter from General
Duroc, wherein I read, that "it was the wish of his Majesty, Emperor and
King, that I, his well-beloved Thomas Burke, in conformity with certain
instructions to be afterwards made known to me, should proceed with the
_comp