--Before I deliver this, let me first simply explain in three words how it was that Victor rose so rapidly. There may be Evangelist-Matthieus among my readers who take this sudden rise, like that of the barometer, as the sign of a speedy fall,--who will say that laurels and salad, which have been forced to ripen in twenty-four hours by spirit on a cloth, wither again just as soon,--nay, who will even joke about the matter, and give out that the Prince's intestines, with their ether, are a fish's swimming-bladder to my hero, who only by its inflation mounts upward. Mining-superintendents laugh at such readers, and inform them that men, particularly the occupants of thrones, look upon a new physician as a new specific,--that they are always most ready to obey a new one,--that Sebastian always deported himself towards every one the first time in the finest manner, whereas with old acquaintances he never said unnecessarily anything witty,--that January loved every one whom he could see through, and that he fortunately recognized in my hero merely a gay fellow fond of life, and did not remark around his head any of Bose's Beatifications,[198] which smell of phosphorus and emit painful sparks,--that Victor was not, like Le Baut, a _pot-plant_ in a crown, but a hyacinth hanging in the open air high above it,--that he was cheery, and made every one else so,--and that another mining-superintendent would not have made so much ceremony with his readers as I: _he_ would merely have told them the main circumstance, that in Victor, in his waggery and behavior generally, the Prince had found and fallen in love with an enchanting resemblance to his fifth son, the _Monsieur_ (lost on the Seven Islands), and that he had made this observation even in London, although Victor was five years younger than the latter.