of the officers of the Royal Guard. Weissbeer, Bairisch, Seidel,
Pilzner, in fact all varieties of beer, and as connoisseurs asserted,
of exceptional excellence, could be procured at the "Haute Noblesse;"
and the most ingenious novelties in the way of gas illumination,
besides two military bands, tended greatly to heighten the flavor of
the beer, and to put the guests in a festive humor. Mr. Hahn had begun
life in a small way with a swallow-tail coat, a white choker, and a
napkin on his arm; his stock in trade, which he utilized to good
purpose, was a peculiarly elastic smile and bow, both of which he
accommodated with extreme nicety to the social rank of the person to
whom they were addressed. He could listen to a conversation in which
he was vitally interested, never losing even the shadow of an
intonation, with a blank neutrality of countenance which could only be
the result of a long transmission of ancestral inanity. He read the
depths of your character, divined your little foibles and vanities,
and very likely passed his supercilious judgment upon you, seeming all
the while the personification of uncritical humility.

It is needless to say that Mr. Hahn picked up a good deal of valuable
information in the course of his career as a waiter; and to him
information meant money, and money meant power and a recognized place
in society. The diplomatic shrewdness which enabled him to estimate
the moral calibre of a patron served him equally well in estimating
the value of an investment. He had a hundred subterranean channels of
information, and his judgment as to the soundness or unsoundness of a
financial enterprise was almost unerring. His little secret
transactions on the Bourse, where he had his _commissionaires_, always
yielded him ample returns; and when an opportunity presented itself,
which he had long foreseen, of buying a suburban garden at a bankrupt
sale, he found himself, at least preliminarily, at the goal of his