It were not possible to imagine anything more different than a Muirtown boy and the Count; but boys judge by an instinct which never fails within its own range, and Muirtown Seminary knew that, with all his foreign ways, the Count was a man. Legends gathered around him and flourished exceedingly, being largely invented by Nestie, and offered for consumption at the mouth of the pistol by Speug, who let it be understood that to deny or even to smile at Nestie's most incredible invention would be a ground of personal offence. The Count was in turn a foreign nobleman, who had fallen in love with the Emperor of Austria's daughter and had been exiled by the imperial parent, but that the Princess was true to the Count, and that any day he might be called from Mistress Jamieson's lodgings to the palace of Vienna; that he was himself a king of some mysterious European State, who had been driven out by conspirators, but whose people were going to restore him, and that some day Speug would be staying with the Count in his royal abode and possibly sitting beside him on the throne. During this romance Speug felt it right to assume an air of demure modesty, which was quite consistent with keeping a watchful eye on any impertinent young rascal who might venture to jeer, when Speug would politely ask him what he was laughing at, and offer to give him something to laugh for. That the Count was himself a conspirator, and the head of a secret society which extended all over Europe, with signs and passwords, and that whenever any tyrant became intolerable, the warrant for his death was sent from Mistress Jamieson's. Whenever one fable grew hackneyed Nestie produced another, and it was no longer necessary in Muirtown Seminary to buy Indian tales or detective stories, for the whole library of fiction was now bound up and walking about in the Count. [Illustration: "WATCHING A BATTLE ROYAL BETWEEN THE TOPS."]