One great cause, perhaps, of Charlie's popularity among the Thuringians was, that as an Englishman he was destitute of that aristocratic hauteur which causes the well-born German officer to regard all under his command as an inferior order of beings, a style of bearing and sentiment unknown alike in the armies of Britain and France. His face was fair, his features handsome, and he was verging on thirty years of age. His character, like his figure, was fully developed and formed; the expression of his eyes betokened intelligence and promise; while his lithe and manly form had all that muscular strength and activity that women often prefer to intellect in men, and which is frequently the result of the out-door sports in the playgrounds of Rugby, Eton, and Harrow, a portion of our English system of education. Though the son of a fox-hunting Warwickshire squire, who knew every cover in Stoneleigh, the Brailes, and the Edgehills, the head of an old but certainly embarrassed family, so far as mortgages and so forth went, he was barely deemed among the wohlgeborn, according to the Prussian standard; and poor Charlie had nothing as yet but his epaulettes and sword, his pay as a soldier of Fortune, with the privileges usually accorded to Continental officers, such as going everywhere at half-price in virtue of their being in uniform--privileges which ours would decline 'with thanks.' Charlie Pierrepont was everywhere a great favourite with the other sex; and perhaps there was no species of flirtation in which he was not a skilled hand, and he had carefully studied the whole 'scale of familiarities, the gamut of love,' as he was wont to call it, from a touch of the hand or the elevation of an eyebrow, upward, to the extremity of tenderness; and thus much of his time had been passed pleasantly for some ten years in every garrison town between the Elbe and the Vistula; but he had always come off scot-free, for he was possessed, as we have said, of but his epaulettes and sword, while many of the girls he met were as finished flirts as himself; and some, after a short acquaintance, would show their hands with a laugh, and, as it were, throw up their cards. 'Kellner! let me have a room on the lowest _étage_ that is unoccupied,' said he, as his portmanteaus were carried in by the hausknecht. 'Yes, mein Herr,' replied the oberkellner, or head-waiter. 'Is the young Count Von Frankenburg here--an officer of the Thuringians?' 'Yes; he is now at the _table d'hôte_. The bell has just rung, so mein Herr is exactly in time for dinner.' 'Very good.' 'This way, mein Herr,' said the waiter, bowing; 'but, though in the Prussian uniform, I think the Herr is an Englishman.' 'How do you know that I am so?' 'Because I myself am one, and I recognized you by your voice.' And, sooth to say, Charlie was very unlike a German in that respect, and had the pleasantly modulated voice of a well-trained English gentleman, and few voices are more agreeable to listen to.