Who knows?  Perhaps Sylvester may fill and founder as the other has done.  He looks miserably bilious and frightened.

I had rather partake of a rare dinner than describe one.  The wines alone represented all the cellars of the Rhine and the whole champagne country.  Fortnoye, who gave the feast, entertained both Sylvester’s party and his own with regal good cheer.  Think not that Henri Fortnoye was the ordinary obfuscated, superfluous, bewildered bridegroom.  On the contrary, assuming immediately the head of his own table, he took the responsibility of the party’s merriment, and made the good humor flow like the wine.  I know not how it was, but ere the meal was over I found myself joining in one of his choruses; Frau Kranich forgot her asceticism and exhumed all her youthful air of gayety; James Athanasius Grandstone promised the host to set his wines running in every State of America.  But the prettiest moment was when the two brides rose and touched glasses, mutually and to the health of the company, apropos of a little wedding-song which Fortnoye had composed and was trolling at the head our willing chorus.

[ILLUSTRATION:  HOMEWARD BOUND.]

CONCLUSION.

I have arrived at Marly, and, with the ssistance of much sarcasm from Hohenfels, am getting on with considerable spirit at my Progressive Geography.  When man’s Hope ceases temporarily to take a merely Human aspect, may it not suffer a fresh avatar and begin in a new and Geographical form its beneficent career?  The Dark Ladye has sunk beneath my horizon, but speculations over the Atlantean and Lunar Mountains are still succulent and vivifying.

[ILLUSTRATION:  CHARLES AND JOSEPHINE.]

I fled, lashed by a hundred despairs and by many symptoms of headache and dyspepsia, from the wedding-feast at Brussels.  Charles and the baron of Hohenfels accompanied me.  It was a night-train.  The spectacle of so much wedded happiness was too much for me, too much for Hohenfels.  The effect was, contrarily, rather stimulating to Charles, who has made a match with Josephine, and with her assistance is now listening, the tear of sensibility in his eye, to Mendelssohn’s “Wedding March” as executed by the village organ!

We passed Valenciennes, Somain, Donai, Arras, Amiens, Clermont, Criel, Pontoise—­the last points of merely bodily travel that I shall ever make:  here-after my itineracy shall be entirely theoretical.  We took a carriage at Pontoise, and traversed the woods of Saint-Germain.  As I neared home I bowed right and left to amicable and smiling neighbors, who waved me good-day from their doors.  So did my Newfoundland, who broke his chain and leaped upon my shoulders, flourishing his tail—­overjoyed to salute the returning Ulysses.

[ILLUSTRATION:  ARGUS AND ULYSSES.]