AN OLD ACQUAINTANCE

Prince Bukaty was an affable old man, with a love of good wine and a
perfect appreciation of the humorous. Had he been an Englishman, he
would have been an honest squire of the old Tory type, now fast fading
before facilities for foreign travel and a cheap local railway service.
But he was a Pole, and the fine old hatred which should have been
bestowed upon the Radicals fell to the lot of the Russians, and the
contempt hurled by his British prototype upon Dissent was cast upon
Commerce as represented in Poland by the thrifty German _emigre_.

The prince carried his bluff head with that air which almost invariably
bespeaks a stormy youth, and looked out over mankind from his great
height as over a fine standing crop of wild oats. As a matter of fact,
he had grown to manhood in the years immediately preceding those wild
early sixties, when all Europe was at loggerheads, and Poland seething
in its midst, as lava seethes in the crater of a volcano.

The prince had been to England several times. He had friends in London.
Indeed, he possessed them in many parts of the world, and, oddly enough,
he had no enemies. To his credit be it noted that he was not an exile,
which is usually another name for a scoundrel. For he who has no abiding
city generally considers himself exempt from the duties of citizenship.

"They do not take me seriously," he said to his intimate friends; "they
do not honor me by recognizing me as a dangerous person; but we shall
see."

And the Prince Bukaty was thus allowed to go where he listed, and live
in Warsaw if he so desired. Perhaps the secret of this lay in the fact