fe's drama, and I will not disgrace her presence. I will
die like a man of honor rather than that her name should be disparaged."

He went on to tell me of my opponent, who was brother to a reigning
sovereign, and himself a royal highness,--Prince Max of Swabia. "He was
not," he added, "by any means a bad fellow, though not reputed to be
perfectly sane on certain topics." However, as his eccentricities were
very harmless ones, merely offshoots of an exaggerated personal vanity,
it was supposed that some active service, and a little more intercourse
with the world, would cure him. "Not," added he, "that one can say he
has shown many signs of amendment up to this, for he never makes an
excursion of half-a-dozen days from home without coming back filled with
the resistless passion of some young queen or archduchess for him. As he
forgets these as fast as he imagines them, there is usually nothing to
lament on the subject. Now you are in possession of all that you need
know about _him_. Tell me something of yourself; and first, have you
served?"

"Never."

"Was your father a soldier, or your grandfather?"

"Neither."

"Have you any connections on the mother's side in the army?"

"I am not aware of one."

He gave a short, hasty cough, and walked the room twice with his hands
clasped at his back, and then, coming straight in front of me, said,
"And your name? What's your name?"

"Potts! Potts!" said I, with a firm energy.

"Potztausend!" cried he, with a grim laugh: "what a strange name!"

"I said Potts, Herr Rittmeister, and not Potztausend," rejoined I,
haughtily.

"And I heard you," said he; "it was involuntarily on my part to add the
termination. And who are the Pottses? Are they noble?"

"Nothing of the kind,--respectable middle-class folk; some in trade,
some clerks in mercantile houses, some holding small government
employments, one, perhaps the chief of the family, an eminent
apothecary!"

As if I had uttered the most irresistible joke, at this word he held his
hands over his face and shook with laughter.

"Heilge Joseph!" cried he, at last, "this is too good! The Prince Max
going out with an apothecary's nephew, or, maybe, his son!"

"His son upon this occasion," said I, gravely.

He, did not reply for some minutes, and then, leaning over the back of a
chair, and regarding me very fixedly, he said,--

"You have only to say who you are, and what your belongings, and nothing
will come of this affa