worn-out, again sat upon the throne, while the Great Man languished on a rock in the Atlantic.  Fools that they had been, not to have hidden the little king of Rome as against this very dog!  It was pitiful.  He never saw a shower in June that he did not hail curses upon it.  To have lost Waterloo for a bucketful of water!  Thousand thunders! could he ever forget that terrible race back to Paris?  Could he ever forget the shame of it?  Grouchy for a fool and Bluecher for a blundering ass. Eh bien; they would soon tumble the Bourbons into oblivion again.

A rambling desultory tale.  And there were reminiscences of such and such a great lady’s salon; the flight from Moscow; the day of the Bastille; the poor fool of a Louis who donned a red-bonnet and wore the tricolor; some new opera dances; the flight of his cowardly cousins to Austria; Austerlitz and Jena; the mad dream in Egypt; the very day when the Great Man pulled a crown out of his saddle-bag and made himself an emperor.  Just a little corporal from Corsica; think of it!  And so on; all jumbled but keyed with tremendous interest to the listeners and to Laura herself.  It was the golden age of opportunity, of reward, of sudden generals and princes and dukes.  All gone, nothing left but a few battle-flags; England no longer shaking in her boots, and the rest of them dividing the spoils!  No!  There were some left, and in their hands lay the splendid enterprise.

Quietly they had pieced together this sum and that, till there was now stored away two-million francs.  Two or three frigates and a corvette or two; then the work would go forward.  Only a little while to wait, and then they would bring their beloved chief back to France and to his own again.  Had he not written:  “Come for me, mon brave.  They say they have orders to shoot me.  Come; better carry my corpse away than that I should rot here for years to come.”  They would come.  But this year went by and another; one by one the Old Guard died off, smaller and smaller had drawn the circle.  The vile rock called St. Helena still remained impregnable.  On a certain day they came to tell him that the emperor was no more.  Soon he was all alone but one; these brave soldiers who had planned with him were no more.  An alien, an outcast, he too longed for night.  And what should he do with it, this vast treasure, every franc of which meant sacrifice and unselfishness, bravery and loyalty?  Let the gold rot.  He would bury all knowledge of it in yonder chimney, confident that no one would ever find the treasure, since he alone possessed the key to it, having buried it himself.  So passed the greatest Caesar of them all, the most brilliant empire, the bravest army.  Ah! had the king of Rome lived!  Had there been some direct Napoleonic blood to take up the work!  Vain dreams!  The Great Man’s brothers had been knaves and fools.