Yours, ever and devoted, Henri De Beauvais. “The thing is impossible,” said I, laying down the letter on the table, and staring over at D'Ervan. “No more so, dear friend, than what you have done for me this evening, and which, I need not tell you, involves no risk whatever. Here am I now, without pass or countersign, your guest,--the partaker of as good a supper and as excellent a glass of wine as man need care for. In an hour hence,--say two at most,--I shall be on my way over to St. Cloud. Who is, then, I ask you, to be the wiser? You'll not put me down in the night report. Don't start: I repeat it, you can't do it, for I had no countersign to pass through; and as the Consul reads these sheets every morning, you are not going to lose your commission for the sake of an absurd punctilio that nobody on earth will thank you for. Come, come, my worthy lieutenant, these same excellent scruples of yours savor far more of the scholar at the rigid old Polytechnique than the young officer of hussars. Help me to that ortolan there, and pass the bottle. There! a bumper of such a vintage is a good reward for so much talking.” While the abbé, continued to exert himself, by many a flippant remark and many a smart anecdote, to dissipate the gloom that now fell over my spirits, I grew only more and more silent. The one false step I had taken already presented itself before me as the precedent for further wrong, and I knew not what course to take, nor how to escape from my dilemma. “I say, Lieutenant,” said D'Ervan, after a pause of some minutes, during which he had never ceased to regard me with a fixed, steady stare, “you are about as unlike the usual character of your countrymen as one can well conceive.” “How so?” said I, half smiling at the remark. “All the Irishmen I have ever seen,” replied he,--“and I have known some scores of them,--were bold, dashing, intrepid fellows, that cared nothing for an enterprise if danger had no share in it; who loved a difficulty as other men love safety; who had an instinct for where their own reckless courage would give them an advantage over all others; and took life easily, under the conviction that, every day could present the circumstance where a ready wit and a stout heart could make the way to fortune. Such were the Irish I knew in the brigade; and though not a man of the number had ever seen what they called the Green Island, they were as unlike the English, or French, or Germans, or any other people, as--as the old Court of Louis the Fourteenth was unlike the guardroom style of reception that goes on nowadays yonder.”