covey of Serene Highnesses, not to speak of flocks of fashionables
from every land of Europe. There was plenty of gossip,--the gossip
of politics, of play, of private scandal. The well-dressed world was
amusing itself at the top of its bent, and every one speaking ill of his
neighbor to his own heart's content. Whatever, however, may be the
grand event of Europe,--the outbreak of a war, or a revolution, the
dethronement of a king, or the murder of an emperor,--at such places
as these the smallest incident of local origin will far out-top it in
interest; and so, although the world at this moment had a very fair
share of momentous questions at issue, Baden had only tongues and ears
for one, and that was the lucky dog that went on breaking the bank at
rouge-et-noir about twice a week.

Ludlow Paten was the man of the day. Now it was his equipage, his
horses; now it was the company he entertained at dinner yesterday, the
fabulous sum he had given for a diamond ring, the incredible offer he
had made for a ducal palace on the Rhine. Around these and such-like
narratives there floated a sort of atmosphere of an imaginative order:
how he had made an immense wager to win a certain sum by a certain day,
and now only wanted some trifle of ten or twelve thousand pounds to
complete it; how, if he continued to break the bank so many times more,
M. Bennasset, the proprietor, was to give him fifty thousand francs
a year for life to buy him off, with twenty other variations on these
themes as to the future application of the money, some averring it was
to ransom his wife from the Moors, and others, as positively, to pay
off a sum with which he had absconded in his youth from a great
banking-house in London; and, last of all, a select few had revived
the old diabolic contract on his behalf, and were firm in declaring that
after he retired to his room at night he was heard for hours counting
over his gains, and disputing with the Evil One, who always came for his
share of the booty, and rigidly insisted on having it in gold. Now, it
was strange enough that these last, however wild the superstructure of
their belief, had really a small circumstance in their favor, which was
that Paten had been met with three or four times in most unfrequented
places, walking with a man of very wretched appearance and most
forbidding aspect, who covered his face when looked at, and was only to
be caught sight of by stealth. The familiar, as he was now calle