there was not a country in it he was not familiar with; intimately
familiar, knowing much of what went on behind the scenes, and the
lives and characters of the men, and not less the women, who
shaped national policies and held the steering-wheels of state.

"Muravief would never do that," he would say. "He is
constitutionally inert, and his imagination has carried him
through too many unfought wars for him to throw down the gage now.
He smokes cigarettes and dreams of endless peace. I had many talks
with him last year and found him impatient of any subject but the
redemption of the paper rouble!"

But his mind had never crossed the Atlantic Ocean. He still
thought that the Civil War had been between North and South
America. To him the United States was a vague region peopled with
miners, pork-packers, and Indians; a jumble of factories, forests,
and red-shirted men digging for gold, all of it fantastically seen
through the medium of Buffalo Bill's show. It was a constant
wonder to him that such conditions had been able to produce a
woman like Florence Fenacre.

"You are the flower of ze prairie," he would say, "an atavism of
type, harking back a dozen generations to aristocratic
progenitors, having nothing in common with the Pathfinder your
Papa!"

"He wasn't a pathfinder," said Florence, "he was a whaler
captain."

But this to the count seemed only the more remarkable. He raised