Which shows a new use for an old Castle; and gives a good receipt for leading a man by the nose. Now if the reader imagined that I wrote the whole of the twelfth chapter of the last volume for the sole purpose of telling a cock and a bull story about a country innkeeper and conjuror's first cousin, he was very much mistaken. Let him immediately transport himself back to the little village of Mesnil St. Loup, and let him remember the church, and the old trees, and the ruined castle beyond, with all the circumstances thereunto appertaining; and if any thing that has since passed has put the particulars out of his mind, let him return to the aforesaid twelfth chapter, and learn it by heart, as a penance for having forgotten it. But if, on the contrary, he remembers it fully--I will go on with my story. It was in the old Chateau of St. Loup, near the village of Mesnil, on a sultry evening about the end of September, that a party was assembled, who, in point of rank and greatness of design, had seldom been equalled within those walls, even when they were the habitation of the great and beautiful of other days. But years and centuries had passed since they had been so tenanted. The court-yard was full of weeds, and grass, and tangled shrubs: the ivy creeping over the ruined walls obtruded its long branches through the unglazed windows, and the breaches which the siege of time had effected in the solid masonry, gave entrance to the wind of night and the wintry tempest. The chamber that had been chosen for a place of meeting on the present occasion was one which, more than any other, had escaped the hand of desolation. The casements, it is true, had long ceased to boast of glass, and part of the wall itself had given way, encumbering with its broken fragments the farther end of the great saloon, as it had once been called. The rest, however, of the chamber was in very tolerable repair, and contained also several pieces of furniture, consisting of more than one rude seat, and a large uncouth table, which evidently had never belonged to the castle in its days of splendour. At the head of this table sat Gaston Duke of Orleans, the younger brother of the King, leaning his head upon his hand in an attitude of listless indifference, and amusing himself by brushing the dust which had gathered on the board before him, into a thousand fanciful shapes with the feather of a pen--now forming fortifications with lines and parallels, and half moons and curtains--and then sweeping them all heedlessly away--offering no bad image of the many vast and intricate plans he had engaged in, all of which he had overthrown alike by his caprice and indecision.