not heeding the sarcasm of
my manner. "There 's no chance for the knaves, now, with the telegraph
system. As it was, there were orders flying through Europe to arrest
Pottinger,--I--can't forget the name. We used to have it every day in
the Chancellerie: Pottinger, five feet nine, weak-looking and vulgar,
low forehead, light hair and eyes, slight lisp, talks German fluently,
but ill. I have copied that portrait of you twenty, ay, thirty times."

"And yet, sir, neither the name nor the description apply. I am no more
Pottinger than I am ignoble-looking and vulgar."

"What's the name, then?--not Harpar, nor Pottinger? But who cares a rush
for the name of fellows like you? You change them just as you do the
color of your coat."

"May I take the liberty of asking, sir, just for information, as you
said awhile ago, how you would take it were I to make as free with you
as you have been pleased to do with _me?_ To give a mock inventory of
your external characteristics, and a false name to yourself?"

"Laugh, probably, if I were amused; throw you out of the window if you
offended me."

"The very thing I 'd do with you this moment, if I was strong enough,"
said I, resolutely. And he flung himself into a chair, and laughed as I
did not believe he could laugh.

"Well," cried he, at last, "as this room is about fifty feet or so from
the ground, it's as well as it is. But now let us wind up this affair.
You want to get away from this, I suppose; and as nobody wants to
detain you, the thing is easy enough. You need n't make a fuss about
compensation, for they 'll not give a kreutzer, and you 'd better not
write a book about it, because 'we' don't stand fellows who write books;
so just take a friend's advice, and go off without military honors of
any kind."

"I neither acknowledge the friendship nor accept the advice, sir. The
motives which induced me to suffer imprisonment for another are quite
sufficient to raise me above any desire to make a profit of it."

"I think I understand you," said he, with a cunning expression in his
half-closed eyes. "You go in for being a 'character.' Haven't I hit it?
You want to be thought a strange, eccentric sort of fellow. Now there
was a time the world had a taste for that kind of thing. Romeo Coates,
and Brummel, and that Irish fellow that walked to Jerusalem, and
half-a-dozen others, used to amuse the town in those days, but it's all
as much bygone now as starched neckcloths and Hessian