resignation. He carefully returned as bad, all the
debts owing to him by his countrymen, and by
this stroke of policy not only obviated the
possibility of their being pressed for payment, but
moved a few of them, through personal gratitude,
to pay him, after he had undergone the ordeal of
whitewashing, some few pounds by way of bonus.
"It will enable me to cultivate my cabbages," he
remarked, philosophically.

Returning to his native country, a gleam of
good fortune shot unexpectedly across his path,
He met with a person whom he had not seen for
ten years. This person was Jean Baptiste
Constant, ex-body-servant to Francis Blunt, Esquire,
who had always been of an active and pushing
turn of mind, and had gone into business at
Chaillot as a manufacturer of paper-hangings,
and was doing, according to his own account,
pretty well. He was anxious to realise a fortune,
he said; not for himself, but he had some one to
leave it to. But where was that some one? To his
misery and despair he could not tell. What had
become of the countess and of her child? They
had disappeared, no one could say which way.
He kept up a correspondence with friends in
half the towns in Europe, but had never been
able to obtain a scintilla of information relating
to Lily or her mother. The countess seemed
to have vanished from the stage, or rather from
the ring. In the chronicles of the sawdust she
was no longer known, even by her horse-riding
name.

Jean Baptiste Constant commiserated the
decayed state of his old friend Rataplan. The
bankrupt hotel-keeper said he had had, by
this time, quite enough of England, and that he
only desired to re-enter London once more, if it
were possible, at the head of an invading army
of his countrymen. "How I would sack
Laycesterre-squarr, and give up the 'Aymarket to
the pillage," he was wont to murmur between
his set teeth, grinding them meanwhile. "Yes;
and that street most infamous, of the Basinghall.
Ah! not one of the functionaries of that tribunal
so proud, from the insolent president to the
lowest huissier, but should passer par les armes,
—all, all, be put to the sword." The vindictiveness
of Rataplan was insatiable and inexorable.

So Jean Baptiste Constant, after meditating
for a time as to how the old man's knowledge
of a country he professed to detest so much
could best be utilised, determined to set him
up in business again in a little twentieth-rate
café, then for sale, just behind the church of
the Madeleine. The street was new; the Rouen
and Havre Railway, the erection of whose
terminus in the Rue d'Amsterdam has so
revolutionised this part of Paris, was not yet dreamt of;
the rent was very low, and the coming in very
reasonable. Rataplan was once more gratified by
becoming a landlord. In the evening of life it
was again his privilege to cook and to command.
Still were the conditions imposed upon him by
his friend, patron, and benefactor, Jean Baptiste,
not devoid of a certain degree of severity.
"Rataplan, mon bon," said the ex-valet to the
rehabilitated bankrupt, "you tried long enough
to set up a little Paris in the midst of London.
That was to please yourself. You made, unless
I am mistaken, rather a mess of it. Now, if
you have no objection, you shall please me. I
want you to set up a little London in the midst
of Paris."

"Never, never!" Rataplan would at first and
vehemently protest. "Jamais en France
l'Anglais ne règnera. No, no, a hundred times no.
Between Rataplan and Albion, the thrice
perjured and perfidious, there yawns a gulf of
hatred and scorn, which blood, and blood alone,
can cumulate."

"Very well," the valet would gravely reply.
"You shall sell bifteks bien saignants. "That is
blood, is it not? One must accomplish his
destiny, my Rataplan, and yours is to do as you
are told."

In the end, Rataplan submitted, cheerfully
enough, to the accomplishment of his destiny,
and did as he was told, most loyally. He entered,
at first grumbling, but at last, smiling, into the
plans of J. B. Constant. They were worthy of
that astute and experienced operator. The
dingy little Café-Estaminet Pharamond in the
Rue Cuit-au-Four, that miserable den where
you could procure nothing but tough flaps of
beef, fried potatoes, burnt bean and chicory
coffee, corrosive absinthe, questionable cognac,
lettuce-leaf cigars, boxes of rickety dominoes,
and greasy packs of cards, suddenly started into
a fresh phase of existence as the Café Restaurant
Chesterfield. At first, J. B. Constant had
thought of christening his establishment "Le
Clarendon," "Le Mivart," "Le Cavendish," or
"Le Mansion House;" but, on reflection, he
admitted that there were difficulties in the way
of the proper pronunciation by foreign lips of
nearly all those names. But every Frenchman
has heard of Milor Chesterfield, and among the
natives the Café Restaurant Chesterfield soon
attained considerable notoriety; while to the
especial class of sojourners in Paris whom
Constant hoped to secure as patrons, the word
Chesterfield had not only an English but a
sporting sound, and, consequently, soon became
very popular.

The patrons he had pitched upon were a
curious race. In every great city, much
frequented by foreigners, there are two
undercurrents of a town life: first, the retainers of the
high and mighty strangers who are on their
travels; and, next, the shiftless and out-of-elbows
creatures who, having once come abroad, are
prevented by poverty from getting home again.
Sometimes they contrive, after years of borrowing
and begging, to raise sufficient funds to
return to the country which has no longer any
need of them; but in many instances they never
do get home, and, shuffling through a shabby
and disreputable life, on the few wits a craving
for bad brandy has left them, die at last, and
are buried in the Potter's Field. Such people
every continental metropolis numbers by
hundreds or by thousands. Generally they belong
to the English nation. We do not consider
ourselves to be foreigners, anywhere; so my