"Glorious news that from the army in Algeria!" cried Chateau-Renaud, rushing into the sanctum. "Glorious, indeed!" replied the editor, looking up from the paper over which he was hurriedly skimming. On the huge table at his side, as well as beneath it, and under his feet and his capacious arm-chair, nothing was to be seen but newspapers. "Take a chair, Renaud, if you can find one, and help yourself to the news. You see I have Lucien similarly engaged yonder." The Ministerial Secretary glanced up from his papers, returned his friend's salutation and resumed his reading. He was dressed with his customary elegance and richness, but his form and face were fuller than when last before the reader, and his brown hair was besprinkled with gray. "I congratulate you, Beauchamp, on being the first to give the news," continued Chateau-Renaud. "Not a paper in Paris but your own has a line from the army this morning." "Rather congratulate me and my paper on having a friend at court." "Ha! and that explains the fact, otherwise inexplicable, that an opposition journal has intelligence, which only the Bureau of War could have anticipated! Treason--treason!" The editor and the Secretary exchanged significant smiles. "Oh! I don't doubt that your favors are reciprocal," continued the young aristocrat, laughing. "I've half a mind to be something useful myself--Minister--editor--anything but an idler and a law-giver--just to experience the exquisite sensation of a new pleasure--the pleasure of revealing and publishing to the world something it knew not before. Why, you two fellows, in this dark and dirty little room, are the two greatest men in Paris this morning--or were, rather, before your paper, Beauchamp, laid before the world what only you and Lucien knew previously. Oh! the delight, the rapture of knowing something that nobody else knows, and then of making the revelation!" "And this news from Algeria is really important," remarked the editor. "Important! So important that it will be before the Chambers this morning," replied the Secretary. "So I supposed," said the Deputy, "and called to learn additional particulars, if you had any, on my way to the Chambers." "We gave all we had, my dear Lycurgus, and for that were indebted to an official dispatch, telegraphed to the War Office, and faithfully re-telegraphed to us by our well-beloved Lucien." "It's true, then, as I have sometimes suspected, that the wires radiate from the Minister's sanctum to the editor's?" was the laughing rejoinder.