The world was before me for a choice, but I had no choice. The only thing I could do was to command mounted troops, and commanders of mounted troops were not in demand. Ages ago I had known how to do other things, but the knowledge had gone from me, and was not to be recalled so long as I had enough money left with which to be unhappy in idle foreboding. I had not laid down my life in the war, but during its wonderful four years I had laid down, so completely, the ways of life of a sober and industrious citizen, and had soaked my whole nature so full of the subtile ether of idleness and vagabondism, that it seemed as easy and as natural to become the Aladdin I might have dreamed myself to be as the delver I had really been. With a heavy heart, then, and a full stomach, I sat in a half-disconsolate, half-reminiscent, not wholly unhappy mood, relapsing with post-prandial ease into that befogged intellectual condition in which even the drizzle against the window-panes can confuse itself with the patter on a tent roof; and the charm of the old wanderings came over me again, filling my table with the old comrades, even elevating my cigar to a brier-wood, and recalling such fellowship as only tent-life ever knows. Such dreaming is always interrupted, else it would never end; mine was disturbed by a small card on a small salver, held meekly across the table by the meekest of waiters. The card bore the name "Adolf zu Dohna-Schlodien," and a count's coronet,--a count's coronet and "zu" (a touch above "von")! I remembered to have seen a letter from my adjutant to the Prussian Consul in Philadelphia, asking him to obtain information about a handsome young musical "Graf zu" something, who was creating a sensation in St. Louis society, and the "zu" seemed to indicate this as the party in question; he had spoken of him as having defective front teeth, which seemed to be pointing to the "color and distinguishing marks," known in Herd Book pedigrees, and human passports,--a means of identification I resolved to make use of; for my experience with the German nobility in America had been rather wide than remunerative.