to me in that
small English section of our circle which gave us much pride and an
occasional son-in-law. This was by no less a person than my dear old
friend Berkley, now grown a ruddy sexagenarian, but still given to
eating breakfast in his bath-tub. The wealthy Englishman, who had
got rich by exporting china ware, was sound on the subject of free
commerce between nations. That any industry, no matter how young might
be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its
prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped
as a fallacy too absurd to be argued. The journals venturing such
an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since
exploded before the whole world. He was still loud in this opinion
when his little book of epigrams, _The Raven of Zurich and Other
Rhymes_, came out, and being bright and saucy was reprinted in
America. The knowledge that he could not tax on a foreign soil his own
ideas, the plastic pottery of his brain, was quite too much for
his mental balance, and he took to inveighing against free trade
in literary manufactures without the slightest perception of
inconsistency, and with all the warmth, if not the eloquence, of Mr.
Dickens on the same theme. The gradual accumulation of subjects like
these--subjects _taboo_ in gentle society--soon made it apparent that
in a Colony of such diverse colors, where every man had a sore spot
or a grievance, and even the Cinderellas had corns in their little
slippers, harmony could only be obtained by keeping to general
considerations of honor, nobility, glory, and the politics of
Beloochistan; on which points we all could agree, and where Mr.
Berkley's witty eloquence was a wonder.

[Illustration: ON WITH THE DANCE!]

It is to my uneasy period, when I was sick with private griefs and
giddy with striving to reconcile incompatibilities, that the episode
of the Chickens belongs. I was looking dissatisfied out of one of
my windows. Hohenfels, disappointed of a promenade by an afternoon
shower, was looking dissatisfied out of the other. Two or three
people, waiting for four o'clock lunch, were lounging about. I had
just remarked, I believe, that I was a melancholy man, for ever
drinking "the sweet wormwood of my sorrows." A dark phantom, like that
of Adamastor, stood up between me and the stars.

"Nonsense, you ingrate!" responded the baron from his niche, "you are
only too happy. You are now in the precise