My friend the engineer had agreed to breakfast with me at the hotel. When I entered the dining-room with the intention of waiting for him, I found two individuals sitting at table. One was no other than the red-nosed Scotchman, the Eleusinian victim whom I had watched through the bottle-rack at Épernay. Of the second I recognized the architectural back, the handsomely rolled and faced blue coat and the marble volutes of his Ionic shirt-collar: it was my good friend of the cathedral. Every trace of his civic grief had disappeared, and he wore a beaming banquet-room air, though the tear of patriotism was hardly dry upon his cheek.
As I paused to dispose of my accoutrements the red nose was saying, "Yes, my dear sir, since yesterday I am a Mason. I have the honor," he pursued, "to be First Attendant Past Grand. It will be a great thing for me at Edinburgh. Burns, I believe, was only Third Assistant, Exterior Lodge: the Rank, however, in his opinion, was but the guinea's stamp. But the advantages of Masonry are met with everywhere. Already in the train last night I struck the acquaintance of a fine fellow, a Mason like myself."
"Allow me to ask," said the cheerful bluebottle, "how you knew him for a Mason like yourself?"
"I'll tell you. I was unable to sleep, because, you see, I had to drink Moët for my initiation: as I am unaccustomed to anything livelier than whisky, it unnerved me. To pass the time I went softly over the signals."
"What signals, if I may be so indiscreet?"
"Number one, you scratch the nose, as if to chase a fly; number two, you put your thumb in your mouth; number three—"
"H'm!" said the professor doubtfully, "those are singular instructions, scratching the nose and sucking the thumb. It strikes me they have been teaching you nursery signals rather than Masonry signals."
"My good friend," said the Scot with extreme politeness, yet not without dignity, "you cannot understand it, because you were not present. I received a Light which burned my eyelashes. The sage always examines a mystery before he decides upon it. My Masonic friend will be here at breakfast to-day: he promised me. Only wait for him. He can explain these things better than I, you will see. The little experiments with our noses and thumbs, you understand, are symbols—Thummim and Urim, or something of that kind."
"Or else nonsense. You have been quizzed, I fear."
The North Briton bridled his head, knitted his brows and pushed back his chair; then, after a moment of pregnant and stormy silence, he turned suddenly around to me, who was enjoying the comedy—"Hand me the cheese."
To be taken for a waiter amused me. Never in the world would a domestic have dared to present himself in a hotel habited as I was. I was in the same clothes with which I had left Passy the morning previous: my coat was peppered with dust, my linen bruised and dingy, my tie was nodding doubtfully over my right shoulder. A waiter in my condition would have been kicked out without arrears of wages.
The professor, looking quickly around, recognized me with a ludicrous endeavor to relapse into the fiery and outraged patriot. He expended his temper on the red nose. "Take care whom you speak to," he cried in a high, portly voice, and pointing to my japanned box, which I had slung upon a curtain-hook. "Monsieur is not an attaché of the house. Monsieur is doubtless an herb-doctor."
There are charlatans who pervade the provincial parts of France, stopping a month at a time in the taverns, and curing the ignorant with samples according to the old system of simulacra—prescribing kepatica for liver, lentils for the eyes and green walnuts for vapors, on account of their supposed correspondence to the different organs. I settled my cravat at the mirror to contradict my resemblance to a waiter, threw my box into a wine-cooler to dispose of my identity with the equally uncongenial herbalist, and took a seat. Nodding paternally to the coat of Prussian blue, I proceeded to order Bordeaux-Léoville, capon with Tarragon sauce, compôte of nectarines in Madeira jelly—all superfluous, for I was brutally hungry, and wanted chops and coffee; but what will not an unsupported candidate for respectability do when he desires to assert his caste? I was proceeding to ruin myself in playing the eccentric millionaire when the door opened, giving entrance to a group of breakfasters.
"There he is—that's the man!" said the homoeopathist, much excited, and indicating to the blue coat a brisk, capable-looking gentleman of thirty-two in a neat silver-gray overcoat. The latter, after slightly touching his nose, nodded to the Scotchman, who in return drew himself up to his full height and formally wiped his mouth with a napkin, as if preparing himself for an ovation. Happily, he contented himself with rubbing his own nose with each hand in turn, and bowing so profoundly that he appeared ready to break at the knees.
"Kellner!" said the silver-gray, making a grand rattle among the plates and glasses, "some wine! some water! some ink! an omelette! a writing-pad! a filet à la Chabrillant!"
The last-named dish is one which Sciolists are perpetually calling filet à la Chateaubriand, saddling the poetic defender of Christianity with an invention in cookery of which he was never capable. I approved the new-comer, who was writing half a dozen notes with his mouth full, for his nicety in nomenclature: to get the right term, even in kitchen affairs, shows a reflective mind and tenderness of conscience. My friend the engineer arrived, and placed himself in the chair I had turned up beside my own. I was ashamed of the rate at which I advanced through my capon, but I recollected that Anne Boleyn, when she was a maid of honor, used to breakfast off a gallon of ale and a chine of beef.
My canal-maker interrupted me with a sudden appeal. "Listen—listen yonder," he said, jogging my knee, "it is very amusing. He is in a high vein to-day."
The gray coat, who had already directed four or five letters, and was cleaning his middle finger with a lemon over the glass bowl, had just opened a lofty geographical discussion with the blue-bottle. I cannot express how eagerly I, as a theorist of some pretension in Comparative Geography, awoke to a discussion in which my dearest opinions were concerned.
"Geography," the active gentleman was saying as he dipped his finger in water to attach the flaps of his envelopes—"geography, my dear professor, is the most neglected of modern sciences. Excuse me if I take from under you, for a moment, your doctoral chair, and land you on one of the forms of the primary department. I would ask a simple elementary question: How many parts of the globe are there?"
"Before the loss of Alsace and Lorraine," said the professor with plaintive humor, "I always reckoned six."
"Very well: on this point we agree."
"Six!" said the Scotchman in great surprise. "You are liberal: I make but five."
"Not one less than six," said the patriot, vastly encouraged with the support he got: "am I not right, sir? We have, first, Europe—"
"Ah, professor," said the silver-gray, interrupting him, "how is this? You, such a distinguished scholar—you still believe in Europe? Why, my dear sir, Europe no longer exists—certainly not as a quarter of the globe. It is simply, as Humboldt very truly remarks in his Cosmos, the septentrional point of Asia."
The surprise seemed to pass, at this point, from the face of the Scot to that of the Strasburger. After reflecting a moment, "Really," murmured he, "I recollect, in Cosmos—But how, then, do you reach six parts of the globe?"
"Only count, professor: Asia, one; Africa, two; Australia, three; Oceanica, four; North America, five; and South America, six."
"You cut America in two?"
"Nature has taken that responsibility. Each part of the world being necessarily an insulated continent, an enormous island, it is too much to ask me to confound the northern and southern continents of America, hung together by a thread—a thread which messieurs the engineers"—he bowed airily to my companion—"have very probably severed by this time."
The honest professor passed his hand over his forehead. "The deuce!" he said. "That is logic perhaps. Still, sir, I think it is rather