"Because I fell into the river, and was picked up by a fisherman; and desiring to know my character after I was dead, I made him cover me with his nets and row me down to Carstein, quite three miles. There I supped with him, and slept too, and the next morning heard that I was drowned." "Oh! one knows that history, which found its way into a certain paper among the lies, and was published in illustration of the eccentricities of genius." Aronach said this very cross,--I wondered whether it was with the Press, or his pupil; but if it were with the latter, _he_ only enjoyed it the more. Then Aronach bade me conduct his guest into the organ-room, while he himself put a period to those howlings of the immured ones which yet conscientiously asserted themselves. We waited a few moments upstairs, and then Aronach carried off the Chevalier to his own room,--a sacred region I had never approached, and which I could only suppose to exist. I then rushed to mine, and was so long in collecting my senses that Starwood came to bid me to supper. I did not detain him then, though I had so much to say; but I observed that he had his Sunday coat on,--a little blue frock, braided; and I remembered that I ought to have assumed my own. Still, my wardrobe was in such perfect order (thanks to Clo) that my own week coat was more respectable than many other boys' Sunday ones; and though I have the instinct of personal cleanliness very strong, I cannot say I like to look smart. When I reached our parlor, I was quite dazzled. There was a sumptuous banquet, as I took it, arranged upon a cloth, the fineness and whiteness of which so far transcended our daily style that I immediately apprehended it had proceeded from the secret hoards in that wonderful closet of Aronach's. The tall glasses were interspersed with silver flagons, and the usual garnishings varied by all kinds of fruits and flowers, which appeared to have sprung from a magic touch or two of that novel magic presence. For the rest, there were delicious milk porridge on our accounts, and honey and butter, and I noticed those long-necked bottles, one like which Santonio had emptied, and which I had never seen upon that table since; for Aronach was very frugal, and taught us to be so. I was so from taste and by habit, but Iskar would have liked to gorge himself with dainties, I used to think. When I saw this last seated at the table I was highly indignant, for he had set his stool by Seraphael's chair. He had fished from his marine store of clothes a crumpled white-silk waistcoat, over which he had invested himself with a tarnished silver watch-chain. But I would not, if I could, recall his audacious manner of gazing over everything upon the table and everybody in the room, with those legs of his stretched out for any one to stumble over, or rather on purpose to make me stumble. I knew this very well, and avoided him by placing my stool on the opposite edge of the board,