It was in some such musing as this I sat in a window of the ‘Nassau,’ at Wiesbaden, during the height of the season of----. Strangers were constantly arriving, and hourly was the reply ‘no room’ given to the disconsolate travellers, who peered from their carriages with the road- sick look of a long journey. As for myself, I had been daily and nightly transferred from one quarter of the hotel to another--now sleeping in an apartment forty feet square, in a bed generally reserved for royalty, now bivouacking under the very slates; one night exposed to the incessant din of the street beside my windows, the next, in a remote wing of the building, where there were no bells in the chambers, nor any waiter was ever known to wander. In fact, I began to believe that they made use of me to air the beds of the establishment, and was seriously disposed to make a demand for some compensation in my bill; and if I might judge from the pains in my bones I contracted in ‘Lit de Parade,’ I must have saved her Majesty of Greece, who was my successor in it, a notable attack of rheumatism. To this shuttlecock state of existence the easiness of my nature made me submit tamely enough, and I never dreamed of rebellion. I was sitting conning over to myself the recollections of some faces I had seen before, when the head waiter appeared before me, with a request that I would be kind enough to give up my place at the table, which was No. 14, to a gentleman lately arrived, and who desired to sit near his friends in that vicinity. ‘To be sure,’ said I at once; ‘I have no acquaintance here, and 114 will do me as well as 14--place me where you like.’ At the same time, it rather puzzled me to learn what the individual could be like who conceived such a violent desire to be in the neighbourhood of some Hamburg Jews--for such were the party around me--when the waiter began to make room for a group that entered the room, and walked up to the end of that table. A glance told they were English. There was an elderly man, tall and well-looking, with the air ‘gentleman’ very legibly written on his quiet, composed features; the carriage of his head, and a something in his walk, induced me to believe him military. A lady leaned on his arm, some thirty years his junior--he was about sixty-six or seven--whose dress and style were fashionable, and at the same time they had not that perfect type of unpretending legitimacy that belongs essentially to but one class. She was, in fact, _trop bien mise_ for a table d’hote; for although only a morning costume, there was a display about it which was faulty in its taste; her features, without being handsome, were striking, as much for the carriage of her head as anything in themselves. There was an air of good looks, as though to say, ‘If you don’t think me handsome, the fault is yours.’ Her eyes were of a bluish grey, large and full, with lightly arched brows; but the mouth was the most characteristic feature--it was