ademic matter.

And so the editors of divers papers were the victims of a decorous
anguish, court-mourning was decreed, and that wreckage which passed for
the mutilated body of Prince Hilary was buried with every appropriate
honor. Within the week most people had forgotten him, for everybody
was discussing the execution of the Duc d'Enghein. And the aged
unvenerable Grand-Duke of Saxe-Kesselberg died too in the same March;
and afterward his other grandson, Prince Augustus, reigned in the merry
old debauchee's stead.

Prince Hilary was vastly pleased. His scheme for evading the tedious
responsibilities of sovereignty had been executed without a hitch; he
was officially dead; and, on the whole, standing bareheaded between a
miller and laundress, he had found his funeral ceremonies to be
unimpeachably conducted. He assumed the name of Paul Vanderhoffen,
selected at random from the novel he was reading when his postchaise
conveyed him past the frontier of Saxe-Kesselberg. Freed, penniless,
and thoroughly content, he set about amusing himself--having a world to
frisk in--and incidentally about the furnishing of his new friend Paul
Vanderhoffen with life's necessaries.

It was a little more than two years later that the good-natured Earl of
Brudenel suggested to Lady John Claridge that she could nowhere find a
more eligible tutor for her son than young Vanderhoffen.

"Hasn't a shilling, ma'am, but one of the most popular men in London.
His poetry book was subscribed for by the Prince Regent and half the
notables of the kingdom. Capital company at a dinner-table--stutters,
begad, like a What-you-may-call-'em, and keeps everybody in a roar--and
when he's had his whack of claret, he sings his own songs to the piano,
you know, and all that sort of thing, and has quite put Tommy Moore's
nose out of joint. Nobody knows much about him, but that don't matter
with these literary chaps, does it now? Goes everywhere, ma'am--quite
a favorite at Carlton House--a highly agreeable, well-informed man, I
can assure you--and probably hasn't a shilling to pay the cabman.
Deuced odd, ain't it? But Lord Lansdowne is trying to get him a
place--spoke to me about a tutorship, ma'am, in fact, just to keep
Vanderhoffen going, until some registrarship or other falls vacant.
Now, I ain't clever and that sort of thing, but I quite agree with
Lansdowne that we practical men ought to look out for these clever
fellows--see that they don't sta