precipitating himself headlong into forty fathoms, either attached or
unattached. His art in baffling Mr. Peterborough's attempts to treat the
unheard-of request as a jest was extraordinary. The ingenuity of his
successive pleas for pressing such a request pertinaciously upon Mr.
Peterborough in particular, his fixed eye, yet cordial deferential
manner, and the stretch of his forefinger, and argumentative turn of the
head--indicative of an armed disputant fully on the alert, and as if it
were of profound and momentous importance that he should thoroughly
defeat and convince his man--overwhelmed us. Mr. Peterborough, not being
supple in French, fell back upon his English with a flickering smile of
protestation; but even in his native tongue he could make no head against
the tremendous volubility and brief eager pauses besetting him.

The farce was too evanescent for me to reproduce it.

Peterborough turned and fled to his cabin. Half the crew were on the
broad grin. The margravine sprang to my father's arm, and entreated him
to be her guest in her Austrian mountain summer-seat. Ottilia was now
her darling and her comfort. Whether we English youth sucked our thumbs,
or sighed furiously, she had evidently ceased to care. Mr. Peterborough
assured me at night that he had still a difficulty in persuading himself
of my father's absolute sanity, so urgent was the fire of his eye in
seconding his preposterous proposal; and, as my father invariably treated
with the utmost reserve a farce played out, they never arrived at an
understanding about it, beyond a sententious agreement once, in the
extreme heat of an Austrian highland valley, that the option of taking a
header into sea-water would there be divine.

Our yacht winged her way home. Prince Ernest of Eppenwelzen-Sarkeld,
accompanied by Baroness Turckems, and Prince Otto, his nephew, son of the