nd was taken up
with the phantoms of his own brain. The mayor and witnesses retired,
and Edward went after the physician. The business of drawing up the
will was put off, until the sick man should have recovered and be
restored to his perfect consciousness.

The physician found the patient's state very alarming. Edward was
called up in the night; but when he entered the room Herr Balthasar
had already breathed his last.

The dismay, the sorrow was universal. The mayor sent to have
everything sealed up. In the midst of this confusion, it seemed a
matter of very little moment that the Hungarian had found means to
escape from his prison.

* * * * *

In the town where the extravagant counsellor Helbach lived, there was
a great feast at which all the epicures famous for their love of good
eating and their knowledge of good dishes were assembled. The
counsellor himself was the soul of such parties: his word was law in
them; and he it was that had managed the present banquet.

The dinner was nearly over; some of the guests, who had business to
call them away, were gone: the company had grown quieter; and it was
only at the upper end of the table, where the counsellor and some of
the scientific eaters were sitting, that the conversation was carried
on with any spirit.

"Believe me, my friends," said the counsellor with great earnestness,
"the art of eating, the skill men may attain in it, has its epochs,
its classical ages, and its decline, corruption, and dark ages, just
as much as every other art; and it seems to me that we are now again
verging to a kind of barbarism in it. Luxury, profusion, rarities, new
dishes, overpeppering, overspicing, all these, my good sirs, are the
artifices now commonly made use of to obtain admiration for a dinner;
and yet these are the very things from which a thinking eater will
turn away with contemptuous slight. In the whole of this department
indeed much still remains to be done; and the stories we read of the
old gormandizer, Heliogabalus, and others who lived during the
decrepitude of the Roman empire, stories at which many men stare with
stupid astonishment, ought only to excite our pity."

"It must always be difficult no doubt," said one of the guests, "to
frame any distinct conception of the dishes and the delicacies of a
former age. If we dress them by such receits as remain, the result
will always have something absurd in it, like the dinner whic