Besides, he proved to us that we were in error as to the date. The
feast of Saint Athanasius, as he showed from a calendar shoved beneath
a quantity of vintners' cards on his study-table, fell on the second
of May, and could not be celebrated before the evening of the first.
It was now the thirtieth of April. He invited us, then, for the next
day at dinner, warning us at the same time that the evening of that
same morrow would see him on his way to the Falls of Schaffhausen.
This idea of dining with an absentee puzzled me.

[Illustration: THE BEGGAR WHO DRANK CHAMPAGNE.]

We both laughed heartily at the engineer's mistake of twenty-four
hours, and he for his part made me his excuses.

Athanasius--whose name I obstinately keep, because it gives him, as
I maintain, a more distinct individuality,--Athanasius happened to
be driving out for the purpose of collecting some friends whom he was
about to accompany to Schaffhausen, and whom he had invited to dinner.
He contrived to stow away two in his buggy, and the rest assembled in
his chambers. We dined gayly and voraciously, and I hardly regretted
even that old hotel-dinner at Interlaken, when the landlord waited on
us in his green coat, and when Mary Ashburton was by my side, and
when I praised hotel-dinners because one can say so much there without
being overheard.

Dinner over, we went out for a stroll through the town. The city of
Épernay offers little remarkable except its Rue du Commerce, flanked
with enormous buildings, and its church, conspicuous only for
a flourishing portal in the style of Louis XIV., in perfect
contradiction to the general architecture of the old sanctuary. The