meet them. The case of Captain Macdonald was not the first, and will not be the last, instance of the rudeness, arrogance, and conceit of Prussian jacks-in-office. I have travelled over hundreds of miles of the most despotic countries in Christendom, without the slightest impediment, and without an angry word; the only serious misunderstanding I ever had in my travels was with a Prussian police-officer. It was in the opera-house at Berlin. I had sat out a heavy ballet called Satanella, only relieved by the sprightly dancing of Marie Taglioni. At the close of the performance I left my stall, followed the throng to the door, and when my body was half in the theatre and half in the lobby, I very innocently (thinking all was over, and having moreover a cold in the head) put on my hat. Forthwith a clutch was made on my arm, and a choking grasp laid on my collar. I turned round and saw a snub-nosed, suet-pudding-faced, yellow-moustached polizei, with the usual spiked helmet, balefully glaring at me with his little pig's-eyes. I shook his paw, which was not of the cleanest, from my collar, and looked at him inquiringly. Der König!" he thundered, pointing to the royal box. Now the King wasn't in the theatre: indeed, the poor creature was lying demented at Charlottenburg, neither was or had been any member of the royal family present; but it is, so it would seem, a rule of the preposterous Prussian etiquette, to remain uncovered while the loge affected to the use of the illustrious house of Hohenzollern is looming even in the extremest distance. Now, do you know what a Russian policeman, a "barbarous ruthless" Moscov, would have done under such circumstances, and supposing such an absurd rule to have existed in any Russian city? He would first have satisfied himself that you were a foreigner. Then he would have endeavoured, so far as gesticulation went, to make you comprehend that you ought to take off your hat; and finally, if his pantomime failed, he would have whispered to some Russian officer who spoke French or German, and the officer in question would have accosted you with a low bow, and touching his cap, would have, with exquisite politeness, enlightened you as to the slight solecism in courtesy you had committed. As, however, I happened to be in Prussia, and had only a pragmatical dunderheaded German to deal with, no opportunity was afforded for any such friendly information. My German was very faulty; but I mustered enough Teuton to tell the man to take his dirty paws off me, and to confound his impudence. We had tremendous row. I am afraid that in the heat of altercation my remarks on the Prussian nation in general, and the royal family of Prussia in particular, were far from complimentary. I expected every moment to be taken into custody; when I was rescued by the good-natured interposition of an officer of hussars. He plunged into a discussion, in far too rapid German for me to understand, with the policeman; but he threw out this interjectional sotto-voce to me in French, "Give him a thaler." I slipped a fat silver effigy of Frederick William into the hand of the polizei; and whether he was suddenly

afflicted with blindness, or was frightened at the interference of the hussar-officer, or gave up any further parley with such an English Hottentot as I for a bad job, he turned on his heel, and I turned on both mine and escaped from the opera-house as rapidly as I might.

I have wandered away, meanwhile, not quite undesignedly from Hamburg and the Alster Bassin. To catch up the dropped stitches is not so very difficult a task; and first let me say a good word for the two great hotels of the Alster-Streit's and the Victoria. There are many more hostelries on the three-sided quay; but the hotels I have named are the crack establishments, and are both as splendid externally as they are internally comfortable. I stopped at the Victoria, where there is a table-d'hôte almost as well supplied with fish, flesh, and fowl as the famous banquet of interminable courses of the Hôtel de Russie at Frankfort. The Hamburgers are prodigious quaffers of champagne; their thirst for the sparkling and exhilarating vintage of (more or less) Epernay quenchless; but next to the Muscovites I should rank as amateurs of flying corks and creaming flasks the marcs-banco-amassing people of the Hanseatic port. How they do clutch and grasp, and strive and scrabble, and toil and moil, after those marcs-banco, to be sure! When they have got them by thousands, they want them by millions; and then their souls begin to thirst for billions, trillions, quadrillions et ainsi de suite. And in the intervals of marcs-banco grubbing, they drink champagne. I presume that the senators and elders and magistrates of Hamburg are men of grave and reverend mien, of sober lives, of immaculate morals; but, for certain, I never lighted upon such a dissipated, not to say abandoned, crew as the young merchants and brokers. I don't allude to the champagne-bottles they empty at the table-d'hôte. At dinner-time there need be no harm in Veuve Cliquot. Roederer may be innocuous, and Mumm moral; but how about the champagne, genuine or spurious (the average price is a couple of thalers per bottle), which is consumed every night in the Hamburg Haymarket? I must be reticent concerning such orgies; but I may hint that there is in Hamburg a narrow lane called the Dammthousalle, a hundred times more profligate for its length, breadth, and cubic capacity than any thoroughfare we can show between Coventry Street and Waterloo Place; which is saying a good deal. The profligacy is perfectly cold-blooded and systematic, and all is kept under the rigidest police surveillance and discipline. I dare say the Senate of Hamburg look upon the Dammthousalle as one of the items which, discreetly managed, may be productive at the end of the year of a comfortable addition to the Senatorial store of marcs-banco. Pecunia non olet.

Contiguous to this well-ordered menagerie of wild-beasts is (or was when I knew Hamburg, a place called the Apollo Saal, lavishly and garishly decorated according to the German taste. Here the tutelary genius St. Cliquot was regularly, or irregularly, worshipped. A colossal model of a champagne-bottle, say fifteen feet high, and duly garnished at the neck with silver-foil, towered in the midst of the principal hall.

Round its base ran a settee covered with crimson velvet. The lady and gentleman patrons of the exemplary institution lounged on this settee; and the bottle, by means of concealed machinery, slowly revolved, like the platform at a pose plastique. I can't help thinking, however, that this clock-work arrangement was somewhat of a work of supererogation. By the time the devotees of St. Cliquot reached the Apollo Saal (which was the Hamburgian "finish") their heads ordinarily turned round quite enough with real champagne to enable them to dispense with any additional circumgyrations from the sham bottle.

On the Alster Bassin by day you would not think such naughty doings were possible. The jingling of the champagne-glasses is drowned by the chinking of marcs-banco. Every body is trading, to the very children at the street-corners bartering slate-pencil for sweetstuff and tobacco. Every thing in the way of a bargain comes home to a Hamburger's heart; but by hook or by crook he must do some kind of trade or other till it is time to amuse himself by playing cards and tippling champagne. There is an enormous café on the Bassin, called the Alster Pavilion, where undeniably the nastiest and most putrescent chalybeate water in the world is retailed at the moderate rate of three halfpence a glass. Ugh! that horrible amalgam of bilge-water and mineral deposits! The worst feature about this appalling beverage is that the Hamburgers seem to make their tea and flavour their ices with it. To drink it down by pailsful, and to be perpetually smoking the largest, longest, and rankest of cigars, are reckoned as observances strictly orthodox in the pursuit of marcs-banco. To have the stomach-ache and nausea, gives, it would appear, a fillip to smart trading. Every body trades. The Alster Pavilion is full of chaffering merchants, and bundles of greasy notes are continually handed over coffee-cups or chalybeate water-goblets. The kellners are quite as familiar with the course of exchange as with the playbill for the night. It does not take long to learn the latter by heart; for at the handsome and commodious opera-house they never seem to play any thing but Lucia de Lammermoor and Robert le Diable, with Flotow's Martha now and then, by way of a change. You have not been half an hour at your hotel before a storm of raps sets in at your door. Every waiter, every chambermaid, every servant in the establishment, down to the boots, has something to sell and wants to trade with you. If you listened to all their appeals, your room would be stocked before sundown with sham eau-de-cologne, sham cigars, sham silk-handkerchiefs, sham lace, and sham jewelry; and the hausknecht, or hall-porter, always has three pounds of the best Hungarian tobacco (scented hay) to sell to your well-born lordship, or else buys operatickets at a discount and sells them to you at a premium. The art of "duffing" has been brought to a greater degree of perfection in Hamburg than in any other Continental city with which I happen to be acquainted; and so farewell to the city sacred to marcs-banco by day, and to the Veuve Cliquot by night.

42

Hairbreadth 'Scapes.

EDMUND S. obtained his commission in 1804, just sixty years ago. He was then a handsome lad of sixteen, of a refined and almost feminine order of beauty. But that fair face and those luxuriant auburn locks were destined to exercise no small influence on his future career.

The regiment was under the command of the celebrated Colonel Pack, better known as Major-general Sir Denis Pack. It was sent in 1805 on an expedition to South Africa; and when Capetown was captured, and the enemy totally defeated, it was ordered across the wide Atlantic, up the mighty La Plata, to the walls of the Spanish colonial town of Buenos Ayres. The occupation of this place by the English was short-lived, and its return to the original possessors disgraceful to the British arms. The English had possession of it but a few weeks, when an enterprising and able French officer, named Liniers, placed himself at the head of the native militia, and took it out of their hands. A second time the place was assailed by English troops; General Whitelock attempted to carry it with a force of 12,000 men, and not only failed in his attempt, but was captured with his whole force.

Ensign S. accompanied his regiment in the expedition to Portugal, and fought under the standard of Sir John Moore; and, indeed, served in the various operations of the army till the beginning of 1809, when he was captured by a troop of French cavalry.

There was a soldier-like enterprise about young Edmund S., which led him to offer his services for duties of a difficult and dangerous character. One of his superior officers speaks of his sagacity and spirit of enterprise, and of the great advantage he (Sir B. D.) derived from his knowledge of the Spanish language, acquired, no doubt, when Edmund was a prisoner in the wilds of South America.

But to our story. Our enterprising young hero was captured by the French, when engaged in a dashing and desultory operation under the command of Sir Robert Wilson, who, in person, surprised and carried off a small post of French cavalry near Calvidella; but here Sir Robert found to his cost, or rather to his lieutenant's cost, that he had caught a Tartar. A troop of French cavalry came to the rescue, overthrew and routed Sir Robert Wilson's followers, and made prisoners of many of them, and among the number of our young hero, who was carried overland to Verdun, in the east of France, a station selected by the French government for English prisoners. The journey was a long and difficult one; but he arrived at his destination in the March of 1809, where he was placed on parole.

Possessed of a cheerful disposition and genial nature, he soon made a number of friends among the French, who vied with each other in treating the handsome young English officer with hospitality and kindness. Verdun at this time was a very pleasant residence. There were balls and parties innumerable, to which all English officers on parole were invited. Our hero appeared at a grand bal-masqué in female costume; and by his delicate tint of check, golden hair, perfect symmetry of frame, and fascinating manners, managed not only to deceive, but positively to captivate the heart of a naval officer in the British service, who danced with and made fierce love to him, to the great amusement of all those who were acquainted with Edmund's assumed character or disguise.

No man likes to be laughed at, especially in a public ball-room; and he dislikes it all the more if he feels he has given any thing like occasion for the laughter, by making a fool of himself, as men often do when desperately in love. In the eyes of the naval officer, young S. had committed an unpardonable offence, which could only be atoned for at the point of the sword or the muzzle of the pistol. It was no use to explain to him that assumed characters were the rule at bal-masqués, and that the more complete the deception, the greater the merit. He met all such arguments by saying that "the feelings of an officer in the British navy had been trifled with; and that the man who had fooled him in such a way, under the guise of a lovely woman, and who had heard things which he should not have heard, must give him the satisfaction of a gentleman."

As the rule in duelling from and before the time of Sir Lucius O'Trigger and Captain Absolute is, that if one party thinks, or resolves to think, himself offended or badly used-no matter what any impartial person, or any number of such persons may think to the contrary-the other party must fight, Lieutenant S. was compelled, most unwillingly, to accept the naval officer's challenge, after offering every apology which one gentleman could offer to another.

They met the following morning, when Edmund, who perhaps felt he had gone a little too far in allowing the naval officer to make a fool of himself, fired in the air. Not so his antagonist, who took deliberate aim and shot our hero through the side. He then rushed up, and, as is usual on such occasions, expressed deep regret and paid marked attention to his wounded "friend," for "they became friends ever after." Heaven protect us from friends or friendships like this, cemented in blood!

The French police at Verdun, who winked at, or rather encouraged, the duel, got into disgrace on account of it; and as some of them were dismissed, a bad feeling sprung up among the inhabitants of the place towards the English prisoners on parole, as "a quarrelsome and bloodthirsty set, who could not take a joke."

Lieutenant S.'s wound was not as serious as was at first appre

VOL. XII.

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