It now remained to perform the morning toilet; and a corps of attendants conveyed Roseton to his dressing-room.  Here the lavish wealth of the Pont-Noirs found another appropriate field for its display.  The floor was of Carrera marble, curiously tesselated, rising in the centre to the support of a fountain, where water-nymphs breathed forth shattered columns of fragrant spray, whose parabolic curves filled a spacious lake below.  Vases of diamond, emerald and ruby crowded the mantles, each filled with some unknown perfume—­the result of Roseton’s miraculous chemistry; for in this science Roseton was supreme.  In a single day he exhausted the resources of American laboratories, and a short visit to Europe convinced him that henceforth he must be his own instructor.  Savants in vain solicited his formulas.  ‘Why,’ he reasoned, ’should I furnish children in science with tools of which they can not comprehend the use?’ Delicate tables, chiseled from the humbler gems, were scattered about the chamber; agate, topaz, lapis-lazuli, amethyst, and a smaragdus of miraculous beauty.  Chairs of golden wire completed the furniture of this unequaled apartment.

The hangings of the walls were a freak at once of genius and lavishness.  They consisted of the bills of the Valley Bank, extravagantly lapped, and of untold denomination.  But the ceiling—­how shall I describe it?  Did you, indeed, look up inimitably into a Hesperian sky, or was this firmament the creation of the painter’s art?  Nothing flecked the profound, unsearchable, impassive blue.  There brooded the primeval heavens, undimmed by earthly vapors, unfathomed by earthly instruments; forever indescribable by earthly tongues.

Two hundred years before, a Pont-Noir of the Roseton branch accumulated immense wealth from a diamond mine in East Haddam, Connecticut.  He was a man of deep and ardent imagination, and uncomprehended by the simple villagers, who irreverently styled him the ‘mad Roseton.’  He died, and left a singular will.  It provided that his estates, money, and jewels, should be realized and invested on interest for the space of two hundred years, by a committee of trustees, consisting of the governors of the six New England States, to be assisted by the fiscal board of Mississippi, whenever such a State should be organized.  At the expiration of that time, the avails were to be paid to Roseton, of Pont-Noir, provided but one of that name should exist; if more were living, the estate was to remain in abeyance until such a condition should be reached.  Not undiscerningly had he foreseen the probability that his will would be disputed, and a short time before his death he caused a formal attestation of his sanity to be made by the entire body of clergymen comprising the Middlesex Conference.  His mode of proof was simple, consisting only of an original manuscript, refuting the Arminian heresy; but it sufficed, and the will was obeyed.  Not unwisely, also, had he calculated upon the energies of population; for,