[Illustration:  An uncivil engineer.]

“Who speaks of engineers?” said a strong baritone voice as a weighty hand fell on my shoulder.  “Are you here to take the train at Noisy?”

“Let the train go to Jericho!  I am trying, on the contrary, to get away from it.”

“Do you mean, then, to go on foot to Epernay?”

“What do you mean, Epernay?”

“Why, have you forgotten the feast of Saint Athanasius?”

“What do you mean, Athanasius?”

The baritone belonged to one of my friends, an engineer from Boston.  He had an American commission to inspect the canals of Europe on the part of a company formed to buy out the Sound line of steamers and dig a ship-canal from Boston to Providence.  The engineer had made his inspection the excuse for a few years of not disagreeable travel, during which time the company had exploded, its chief financier having cut his throat when his peculations came out to the public.

[Illustration:  LOCOMONIAC possession.]

“Are you trying, then, to escape from one of your greatest possible duties and one of your greatest possible pleasures?  You have the remarkable fortune to possess a friend named Athanasius; you have in addition, the strange fate to be his godfather by secondary baptism; and you would, after these unparalleled chances, be the sole renegade from the vow which you have extracted from the others.”

The words were uncivil and rude, the hand was on my shoulder like a vise; but there floated into my head a recollection of one of the pleasantest evenings I have ever enjoyed.

We were dining with James Grandstone, one of my young friends.  I have some friends of whom I might be the father, and doubt not I could find a support for my practice in Sir Thomas Browne or Jeremy Taylor if I had time to look up the quotation.  We dined in the little restaurant Ober, near the Odeon, with a small party of medical students, to which order Grandstone’s friends mostly belonged.  We were all young that night; and truly I hold that the affectionate confusion of two or three different generations adds a charm to friendship.

[Illustration:  Le Raincy:  The chateau.]

At dessert the conversation happened to strike upon Christian names.  I attacked the cognomens in ordinary use, maintaining that their historic significance was lost, their religious sentiment forgotten, their euphony mostly questionable.  Alfred, Henry and William no longer carried the thoughts back to the English kings—­Joseph and Reuben were powerless to remind us of the mighty family of Israel.

“I have no complaint to make of my own name,” I protested, “which has been praised by Dannecker the sculptor.  That was at Wuertemberg, gentlemen.  ‘You are from America,’ the old man said to me, ’but you have a German name:  Paul Flemming was one of our old poets.’  The thought has been a pleasant one to me, though I have not the faintest idea what my ancient godparent wrote.  But in the matter of originality my Christian name of Paul certainly leaves much to desire.”