ut he smiled, thanked the
reporter, and strolled away from the parapet, telling all the people he
met: "It is a fete! Prince Andras, a Hungarian, is about to be married.
Prince Andras Zilah! A fete on board a steamer! What a droll idea!"

Others, equally curious, leaned over the Quai des Tuileries and watched
the steamer, whose tricolor flag at the stern, and red streamers at the
mastheads, floated with gay flutterings in the fresh morning breeze. The
boat was ready to start, its decks were waxed, its benches covered with
brilliant stuffs, and great masses of azaleas and roses gave it the
appearance of a garden or conservatory. There was something highly
attractive to the loungers on the quay in the gayly decorated steamer,
sending forth long puffs of white smoke along the bank. A band of
dark-complexioned musicians, clad in red trousers, black waistcoats
heavily embroidered in sombre colors, and round fur caps, played odd airs
upon the deck; while bevies of laughing women, almost all pretty in their
light summer gowns, alighted from coupes and barouches, descended the
flight of steps leading to the river, and crossed the plank to the boat,
with little coquettish graces and studied raising of the skirts, allowing
ravishing glimpses of pretty feet and ankles. The defile of merry, witty
Parisiennes, with their attendant cavaliers, while the orchestra played
the passionate notes of the Hungarian czardas, resembled some vision of a
painter, some embarkation for the dreamed-of Cythera, realized by the
fancy of an artist, a poet, or a great lord, here in nineteenth century
Paris, close to the bridge, across which streamed, like a living
antithesis, the realism of crowded cabs, full omnibuses, and hurrying
foot-passengers.

Prince Andras Zilah had invited his friends, this July morning, to a
breakfast in the open air, before the moving panorama of the banks of the
Seine.

Very well known in Parisian society, which he had sought eagerly with an
evident desire to be diverted, like a man who wishes to forget, the
former defender of Hungarian independence, the son of old Prince Zilah
Sandor, who was the last, in 1849, to hold erect the tattered standard of
his country, had been prodigal of his invitations, summoning to his side
his few intimate friends, the sharers of his solitude and his privacy,
and also the greater part of those chance fugitive acquaintances which
the life of Paris inevitably gives, and which are blown away a