In a miserable den, an hour or so before--there are miserable dens even in Baden, that gold-decked rendezvous of princes, where crowned heads are numberless as couriers, and great ministers must sometimes be content with a shakedown--two men sat in consultation. Though the chamber was poor and dark, their table was loaded with various expensive wines and liqueurs. Of a truth they were flush of money, and selected this poor place from motives of concealment rather than of necessity. One of them was the “welsher,” Ben Davis; the other, a smaller, quieter man, with a keen, vivacious Hebrew eye and an olive-tinted skin, a Jew, Ezra Baroni. The Jew was cool, sharp, and generally silent; the “welsher,” heated, eager, flushed with triumph, and glowing with a gloating malignity. Excitement and the fire of very strong wines, of whose vintage brandy formed a large part, had made him voluble in exultation; the monosyllabic sententiousness that had characterized him in the loose-box at Royallieu had been dissipated under the ardor of success; and Ben Davis, with his legs on the table, a pipe between his teeth, and his bloated face purple with a brutal contentment, might have furnished to a Teniers the personification of culminated cunning and of delighted tyranny. “That precious Guards' swell!” he muttered gloatingly, for the hundredth time. “I've paid him out at last! He won't take a 'walk over' again in a hurry. Cuss them swells! They allays die so game; it ain't half a go after all, giving 'em a facer; they just come up to time so cool under it all, and never show they are down, even when their backers throw up the sponge. You can't make 'em give in, not even when they're mortal hit; that's the crusher of it.” “Vell, vhat matter that ven you have hit 'em?” expostulated the more philosophic Jew. “Why, it is a fleecing of one,” retorted the welsher savagely, even amid his successes. “A clear fleecing of one. If one gets the better of a dandy chap like that, and brings him down neat and clean, one ought to have the spice of it. One ought to see him wince and--cuss 'em all!--that's just what they'll never do. No! not if it was ever so. You may pitch into 'em like Old Harry, and those d----d fine gentlemen will just look as if they liked it. You might strike 'em dead at your feet, and it's my belief, while they was cold as stone they'd manage to look not beaten yet. It's a fleecing of one--a fleecing of one!” he growled afresh; draining down a great draught of brandy-heated Roussillon to drown the impatient conviction which possessed him that, let him triumph as he would, there would ever remain, in that fine intangible sense which his coarse nature could feel, though he could not have further defined it, a superiority in his adversary he could not conquer; a difference between him and his prey he could not bridge over. The Jew laughed a little.