The morning of the duel broke with all the freshness and warmth and brilliancy of the genial spring in the latitude of Paris. In the picturesque Clamart suburb, with its market-gardens and white villas, its plantations, its windmills, and its vine-clad slopes, the aspect was one of ripe loveliness. It was a rosy, odorous, appetizing morn; a morn for a pleasant woodland walk under the branches where small birds chavished; a morn to drop gently down the river and ply the indolent rod; a morn for a canter on a brisk cob across the sweet-scented meadows; a morn for plucking flowers, smoking choice cigars, love-dreaming, or poetic musing--for anything, in fact, but thoughts of sudden and violent death. It has been remarked by some moralists that sunny, innocent, enjoyable morns, when the blood seems to bound joyously in the veins, and the very act of breathing is a vivid pleasure, have an ugly habit of intruding themselves unbidden when armies are about to join in strife or criminals are about to tread the scaffold. The Gascon never before realized how very comfortable a world it is, and how very disagreeable it would be to leave it while he was yet young and healthy, with a sound stomach and a liver unconscious of derangement. But his pride was greater than his fears, and coating his doubts and apprehensions under a veneer of indifference, he was the first to warn his friends of the necessity of being punctilious at the trysting-place. As punctuality is the courtesy of kings, so also is it of duellists. The Gascon and his party were first on the ground--four of them, the principal, Blue Spectacles, Pale Face, and a young medical practitioner with an ominous set of surgical instruments cunningly hidden in a fiddle-case to disarm suspicion. Hardly had they alighted from their _voiture_, and walked towards the village where O'Hara had arranged to meet them, when a singular approaching whir of wheels was heard, blent with the noisy ululation of a dog. Turning the corner, there came into view O'Hara and the O'Hoolohan riding to the rendezvous on bicycles! They had adopted this original method of evading the prying gendarmes of the locality. Pat had followed them--followed them perforce; for the now lazy animal had been tied by a rope to the tool-box of a machine, and was forced to keep pace with the 'steel steed.' 'Pardon, gentlemen,' said O'Hara, jumping from his tiny saddle, 'but if we are a little late it is my fault I did not think the gradients on the road were so trying.' The Gascon's friends advanced, accepted the excuse with excessive show of politeness, and Blue Spectacles, as the senior, presented the doctor in form. 'Very thoughtful of you, indeed!' said O'Hara, in an undertone. 'My man never hires a surgeon--never needs one, for the matter of that. Have you that letter I spoke of ready?' at the same time handing the young Frenchman a document to the following effect: