you and Lucien knew
previously. Oh! the delight, the rapture of knowing something that
nobody else knows, and then of making the revelation!"

"And this news from Algeria is really important," remarked the editor.

"Important! So important that it will be before the Chambers this
morning," replied the Secretary.

"So I supposed," said the Deputy, "and called to learn additional
particulars, if you had any, on my way to the Chambers."

"We gave all we had, my dear Lycurgus, and for that were indebted to an
official dispatch, telegraphed to the War Office, and faithfully
re-telegraphed to us by our well-beloved Lucien."

"It's true, then, as I have sometimes suspected, that the wires radiate
from the Minister's sanctum to the editor's?" was the laughing
rejoinder.

"It must be so, or there's witchcraft in it. There's witchcraft, at any
rate, in this new invention. Speed, secrecy, security and surety--no
eastern genius of Arabian fiction can be compared to the electric
telegraph; and how Ministers or editors continued to keep the world in
vassalage, as they always have done, without this ready slave, seems now
scarce less wonderful than the invention itself. Instead of detracting
from the power of the press, the telegraph renders it more powerful than
ever."

"But affairs in Algeria--is not the news splendid!" cried the editor.
"Why did we not all become Spahis and win immortality, as some of our
generals have?"

"As to immortality," said the Secretary, "we should have been far more
likely to win the phantom as dead men than as living heroes."

"Debray was at the raising of the siege of Constantine," said Beauchamp
laughing, "and knows all about the honors of war."

"Yes, indeed, and all about the raptures of starvation, of cold and
hunger, after victory, and the ecstatic felicity of being pursued by six
Bedouins, and after having slain five having my own neck encircled by
the yataghan of the sixth!"

"And how chanced it that you saved your head, Lucien?" asked the Count.

"Save it--I didn't save it; but a most excellent friend of mine--a
friend in need--galloped up and saved it for me."

"Yes," replied Beauchamp, "our gallant friend, Maximilian Morrel, the
Captain of Spahis--now colonel of a regiment, and in the direct line of
promotion to the first vacant baton--eh, Lucien? A lucky thing to save
the head of one of the War Office from a Bedouin's yataghan. Up--up--up,
like a balloon, has this young Spahi r