Madame de Metternich, who did not come to London with them, was not a pretty woman; indeed, she spoke of herself as “le singe à la mode;” but she was witty and very attractive, and so became the high priestess of that religion of which Worth, the famous man-milliner, a former apprentice of Swan and Edgar’s, who had raised his temple in the Rue de la Paix, was the Pope, on the hierarchy of fashion. She was perhaps one degree greater than the other three ladies, but above them all was enthroned the Empress Eugénie, a divinity at whose altar all men and women were fain to fall down and worship. These are strangely frivolous recollections of pretty women and smart dresses and coxcombry of men-milliners that came thrusting themselves into the midst of one of the great tragedies of history. But these are the tricks which memory plays us: the most grotesque ideas surging up in the midst of acute sorrow, the dance of death serving to accentuate the follies of a farce—so unstable are our minds. All this is conjured up by the recollection of Gallifet, before he became a famous cavalry general, when he was a brilliant young officer, the spoilt child of a court, the favourite officer of an emperor, popular with men and women, idolized by his soldiers, long before the cruel wounds of the Mexican campaign—when he showed what the man about town was worth when brought face to face with grim war—the last man in Europe of whom I should have thought that one day he would have to experience those emotions which cause the most callous judge’s voice to falter when he puts on the black cap. Later in life, with his closely-cropped white hair and moustache dyed black, he was a picturesque figure in Paris—still a beau sabreur, still a soldier at every point—a name to conjure with had the opportunity presented itself. TREES AND THEIR LEGENDS Solitude, surrounded by memories of which I have spoken, and by the fanciful brood of thoughts to which they give birth, has a mystic power of banishing all trammels of time and of place. The plants in the garden begin to take strange forms: the bamboos are drawn up out of their puny Western stature into gracefully-waving plumes of Brobdingnagian growth, such as we see in the Peradeniya Gardens of Ceylon; the oak under which the great Buddha sits, solemnly holding up a warning hand, changes into a holy Bō-tree, its long-stalked, pointed leaves quivering in a gentle breeze, laden with the heavy perfume of the sacred Champak flower; the fleece of clouds sails away into space and the soft English sky hardens into the metallic blue of the glaring East.