PREPARATIONS AND COGITATIONS The story itself was brief enough, but there was plenty of husk to the grain.

The old expatriate was querulous, long-winded, not niggard with his ink when he cursed the English and damned the Prussians; and he obtained much gratification in jabbing his quill-bodkin into what he termed the sniveling nobility of the old regime.

Dog of dogs! was he not himself noble?
Had not his parents and his brothers gone to the guillotine with the rest of them?
But he, thank God, had no wooden mind; he could look progress and change in the face and follow their bent.

And now, all the crimes and heroisms of the Revolution, all the glorious pageantry of the empire, had come to nothing.

A Bourbon, thick-skulled, sordid, worn-out, again sat upon the throne, while the Great Man languished on a rock in the Atlantic.