The Project Gutenberg EBook of Count Bunker, by J. Storer Clouston

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Title: Count Bunker
Being a Bald yet Veracious Chronicle Containing some Further
Particulars of Two Gentlemen Whose Previous Careers Were
Touched Upon in a Tome Entitled "The Lunatic At Large"

Author: J. Storer Clouston

Posting Date: September 26, 2008 [EBook #1613]
Release Date: January, 1999

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Charles Keller

COUNT BUNKER

Being A Bald Yet Veracious Chronicle Containing Some Further Particulars
Of Two Gentlemen Whose Previous Careers Were Touched Upon In A Tome
Entitled "The Lunatic At Large"

By J. Storer Clouston

COUNT BUNKER

CHAPTER I

It is only with the politest affectation of interest, as a rule,
that English Society learns the arrival in its midst of an ordinary
Continental nobleman; but the announcement that the Baron Rudolph von
Blitzenberg had been appointed attache to the German embassy at the
Court of St. James was unquestionably received with a certain flutter of
excitement. That his estates were as vast as an average English county,
and his ancestry among the noblest in Europe, would not alone perhaps
have arrested the attention of the paragraphists, since acres and
forefathers of foreign extraction are rightly regarded as conferring
at the most a claim merely to toleration. But in addition to these
he possessed a charming English wife, belonging to one of the
most distinguished families in the peerage (the Grillyers of
Monkton-Grillyer), and had further demonstrated his judgment by
purchasing the winner of the last year's Derby, with a view to improving
the horse-flesh of his native land.

From a footnote attached to the engraving of the Baron in a Homburg hat
holding the head of the steed in question, which formed the principal
attraction in several print-sellers' windows in Piccadilly, one gathered
that though his faculties had been cultivated and exercised in every
conceivable direction, yet this was his first serious entrance into the
diplomatic world. There was clearly, therefore, something unusua