as not pleased to see him at Athens, and he ran over
all the possible contingencies he might have come for. It might be the old
Greek loan, which was to be raked up again as a new grievance. It might be
the pensions that they would not pay, or the brigands that they would not
catch--pretty much for the same reasons--that they could not. It might
be that they wanted to hear what Tsousicheff, the new Russian Minister,
was doing, and whether the farce of the 'Grand Idea' was advertised for
repetition. It might be Crete was on the _tapis_, or it might be the
question of the Greek envoy to the Porte that the Sultan refused to
receive, and which promised to turn out a very pretty quarrel if only
adroitly treated.

The more Brammell thought of it, the more he felt assured this must be the
reason of Atlee's visit, and the more indignant he grew that extra-official
means should be employed to investigate what he had written seventeen
despatches to explain--seventeen despatches, with nine 'inclosures,' and a
'private and confidential,' about to appear in a blue-book.

To make the dinner as confidential as might be, the only guests besides
Atlee were a couple of yachting Englishmen, a German Professor of
Archaeology, and the American Minister, who, of course, speaking no language
but his own, could always be escaped from by a digression into French,
German, or Italian.

Atlee felt, as he entered the drawing-room, that the company was what he
irreverently called afterwards, a scratch team; and with an almost equal
quickness, he saw that he himself was the 'personage' of the entertainment,
the 'man of mark' of the party.

The same tact which enabled him to perceive all this, made him especially
guarded in all he said, so that his host's efforts to unveil his intentions
and learn what he had come for were complete failures. 'Greece was a
charming country--Greece was the parent of any civilisation we boasted.
She gave us those ideas of architecture with which we raised that glorious
temple at Kensington, and that taste for sculpture which we exhibited near
Apsley House. Aristophanes gave us our comic drama, and only the defaults
of our language made it difficult to show why the member for Cork did not
more often recall Demosthenes.'

As for insolvency, it was a very gentlemanlike failing; while brigandage
was only what Sheil used to euphemise as 'the wild justice' of noble
spirits, too impatient for the sluggard steps of slow redr