A funny thing happened in the afternoon in connection with the old beau's wetting that would have covered anybody else but such a consummate old courtier with ridicule. After lunch it cleared off, and the sun came out very hot and dried up things so quickly that everybody had tea as usual in the garden of the hotel. The Hungarian band had just finished playing a valse of Waldeuffel, and the Maréchale de Vichy-Pontoise had hobbled out into the garden and settled herself comfortably in her favourite seat next to the Princesse di Spezzia when something slowly descended from the sky performing curious evolutions. Everybody speculated as to what it could be and where it came from, when it calmly lighted on the head of the Maréchale, who gave a wizened shriek, and having disengaged herself from it shied it away savagely with the end of her stick. Bijou at once seized it in his mouth, and having gambolled about the grass with it proceeded to improvise it into a broom and sweep up the gravel path with it. The difficulty of getting him to relinquish his possession of it caused a great deal of merriment, and the young man who reads "L'Insaisissable" and ogles Liane de Pougy at the same time suddenly put his foot on it with such force that Bijou, who was scampering off as hard as he could go with an end in his mouth, was brought up short, and, having turned a rather violent somersault in the air, let go and went off whimpering to the Maréchale, who looked as if she could have eaten the young Frenchman. He picked up Bijou's mysterious plaything and held it up, so that everybody could see--a white flannel jacket, or what was left of it, of the jauntiest cut in the world. No one claiming it, he handed it to a waiter who discovered on a tag the _chiffre_ of Comte Belladonna! Instead of at once withdrawing with the garment he informed the Comte that it belonged to him. The Comte, who knew it all the time and had not cared to make himself the butt of the National, examined it, shook his head, examined it again, and bursting into a laugh exclaimed to the Princesse di Spezzia with the utmost self-possession:-- "My dear Princesse, alas! this rag is indeed mine. This morning, spotless and sweet-smelling, I arrayed my old bones in it, and its mate, whose legs you may see dangling out of that window up there under the roof; but, as if envious of the figure I cut in it, the elements having determined to deprive me of it, flooded me out of it. Not being an American millionaire, I hung it out of my window to dry, and the wind did the rest. Heaven grant that the trousers do not come to look after the jacket. Pity me, Princesse, I had worn it but once; it was cut at 'Old England.' Here, garçon, it is yours now." It was not the words, which were funny enough, but the manner in which they were uttered, that made every one laugh _with_ the Comte instead of _at_ him. {_Signor Stefano_}