gentleman, who, though quite beardless and very ruddy in complexion, looked immensely old. The dwarf was a great dandy, and had very near as large a courier-bag by his side as the stout gentleman. Either he seemed to have taken a great liking to the red-nosed man, or the red-nosed man to him; for the two were talking, and laughing, and gesticulating, and exchanging cigar-lights; and when the dwarf was called away by the conducteur to his place in the banquette of the departing diligence, he shook hands warmly with the red-nosed man, and seemed inclined to leap up, cast his arms about his neck, and kiss him on both cheeks. "Do you know him?" asked the slim gentleman as they walked away from the Post Bureau. "Is he Count Beniowski come to life again? Is he General Tom Thumb's great-grandfather?" "Never saw him before in my life," was the M. I. C.'s reply. "He spoke excellent French; wanted me to come and take Kirsch-wasser and German sausage with him, and seemed inclined to ask me to stop a week with him. He lives in the Friedriche Strasse. Dwarfs, if you don't laugh at them in the first instance (when they immediately want to poison you) are generally very good fellows. He is going to Hombourg." "You mean Hamburg. It's on the Elbe." "I mean Hombourg," reiterated the red-nosed man; " and it isn't on any river at all. It's of der Höhe, and it's at the foot of the Taurus Mountains." Well, and what more about Hombourg?" asked the slim gentleman, rather superciliously. "What more!" echoed the exciteable M. I. C. "What more? Happiness more; Youth more; Beauty more; Splendour more; Delirious Joy and Luxury more! "In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure dome decree, "Stop him, stop him!" cried the stout gentleman. "He's had a sun-stroke; he's been eating opium; mad!" he's "If this unseemly behaviour continues, and in the most public street of the wealthy and respectable free imperial city of Frankfort," the slim gentleman interposed, "I give you fair warning that I shall immediately return to England, and leave you gentlemen to find your way home in the manner most pleasing to you. Now proceed, if you can, rationally, my rednosed interlocutor." The M. I. C. proceeded, and so rationally; he gave them (at second-hand from the dwarf) such chastened yet glowing accounts of Hombourg-von-der-Höhe, as a place situated amidst some of the most charming scenery in Europe, and only eight miles distant from Frankfort-as an Armida's garden of dainty and delicate dalliance, where life was a round of feasting, singing, dancing, and merrymaking-that when he had concluded, and the stout gentleman cried "Why not go to Hombourg this very night? we can but come back again, if we don't like it," the slim gentleman did not say him nay; and by common consent they all three retraced their steps to the Post Bureau, and, at the expenditure of a florin and a half, purchased three tickets for places in the mail-carriage which was to start for the "Armida's garden of dainty and delicate dalliance" at eight o'clock that evening. They did not dine, however, at the table-d'hôte of the Hotel de Russie. They partook of their prandial repast at a French restaurant a la carte, where they dined in a court-yard, at a little green table, under the spreading shade of some lime-trees. And it is a fact that, ere dinner was over, the slim gentleman, ordering a bottle of Roederer's champagne, caused his companions to fill bumpers of that exhilarating fluid, and to drink the following strange toast: "For Hombourgvon-der-Höhe! for Hombourg, Ho!" 130 CHAPTER V. THE TRAVELLERS ARRIVE AT HOMBOURG, ALIAS VANITY FAIR. THE postilion was a philosopher. I don't say that he had read Ennius, Ælian, Philo, or the Scholiast upon anybody; but he was a philosopher nevertheless. He had garnered up one sage apothegm within that red-waistcoated bosom of his: that it is fitting and proper to make a good beginning and ending-a good entrance and exit in life. Fortune and the Frankforter postal authorities had bestowed upon him a portentous whip with a short stock, and a tremendously long lash, whose crackling sinuosities were horrible to behold and hear. Never did postilion make so good a use of his whip-not a better use, indeed, could any human being make of an instrument of torture whose accursed employment is fading out of prisons and barracks, and families and schoolswhose lacerating agency is now confined chiefly to dumb animals, and on those poor brutes even verberated mainly by drivers brutal and unskilful, and which, ere long, this writer hopes will fade away from the world altogether. For no more good ever came of whips and scourges than of racks and thumbscrews. The best use the German postilion made of his flagellum was this: that he did not beat his horses therewith. Poor ill-groomed, ragged-tailed, scanty-maned, hollow-eyed animals, with their painfully-defined anatomical development, the rope harness chafing their baggy, rough hides, and their general look of being twin brothers to that lamentable quadruped, standing |