anteroom to his cabinet, and in which Graham had generally to wait some
minutes before he was introduced, was generally well filled, and not only
by persons who, by their dress and outward appearance, might be fairly
supposed sufficiently illiterate to require his aid as polite letter-
writers,--not only by servant-maids and grisettes, by sailors, zouaves,
and journeymen workmen,--but not unfrequently by clients evidently
belonging to a higher, or at least a richer, class of society,--men with
clothes made by a fashionable tailor; men, again, who, less fashionably
attired; looked like opulent tradesmen and fathers of well-to-do
families,--the first generally young, the last generally middle-aged.
All these denizens of a higher world were introduced by a saturnine clerk
into M. Lebeau's reception-room, very quickly and in precedence of the
_ouvriers_ and _grisettes_.

"What can this mean?" thought Graham; "is it really that this humble
business avowed is the cloak to some political conspiracy concealed,--the
International Association?" And so pondering, the clerk one day singled
him from the crowd and admitted him into M. Lebeau's cabinet. Graham
thought the time had now arrived when he might safely approach the
subject that had brought him to the Faubourg Montmartre.

"You are very good," said Graham, speaking in the English of a young earl
in our elegant novels,--"you are very good to let me in while you have so
many swells and nobs waiting for you in the other room. But, I say, old
fellow, you have not the cheek to tell me that they want you to correct
their cocker or spoon for them by proxy?"

"Pardon me," answered M. Lebeau in French, "if I prefer my own language
in replying to you. I speak the English I learned many years ago, and
your language in the _beau monde_, to which you evidently belong, is