s own peculiar taste, find whatever pleases their
palate best. Whatever is rarest, most fantastic--things only dreamed
of--the epicurean connoisseur has only to invoke, and, at a touch of the
magic wand of Mammon, it is there before him. Wines, too,--what-not,
est-est, tokay, and all the rest, flowing from the inexhaustible tap of
the same Mephistopheles, with his golden gimlet. All the demons of
luxury riot there, and at your nod ransack the earth for a flavor or a
flask; and place it before you, almost before your wish is uttered. It
is, indeed, the Mahomet's paradise of all true believers in the stomach,
and worshippers of Bacchus. Thus in a realized dream all eddies on in a
delicious intoxication, and each is at once the recipient of enjoyment
and the dispenser of good-humor, imbibing through every sense enchanted
fare, reflecting smiles, and radiating hilarity. Each, indeed, becomes,
as it were, a single glowing particle in the genial and brilliant mass,
and tends to keep alive the general fire, from which he derives and to
which returns at once light and geniality. It is admitted that he who
has discovered the grand arcanum, and has the philosopher's stone in his
waistcoat-pocket, is, so to speak, _ex officio_, a magician. But M. Le
Prun had no need of any such discoveries. He had the gold itself, and
was, therefore, a ready-made magician, and as such was worshipped
accordingly with an oriental fanaticism.

Monsieur le Prun had, like other favorites of fortune in the latter days
of the monarchy, purchased his patent of noblesse. Every body knew that
he was a _parvenu_; and rumor, as she is wont in such cases, had adorned
his early history with so many myths and portents, that Niebuhr himself
could hardly have distinguished between the fable and the truth. It was
said and believed that he was a foundling--a Gipsy's son, a wandering
beggar, a tinker. Others had seen him in rags, selling pencils at the
steps between the Pont-Neuf and the Pont-au-Change. Others, again,
maintained that he had for years filled the canine office of guide to an
old blind mendicant, whose beat was about the Rue de Bauboug; and were
even furnished with a number of pleasant anecdotes about his hardships
and adroitness, while in this somewhat undignified position. Indeed, the
varieties of positions though which good Mother Gossip sent him were
such, and so interminable, that a relation of half of them would alone
make a library of fiction. But