At length we entered the station of Epernay.  There I received my first shock in learning that the only return-train stopping at Noisy was one which left at midnight, and would land me in the extreme suburbs of Paris at three o’clock in the morning.

Our friend Grandstone, whom we found amazing the streets of Epernay with a light American buggy drawn by a colossal Morman horse, received us with still more surprise than delight.  He had relapsed into plain James, and had never dreamed that his second baptism would bear fruit.  Besides, he proved to us that we were in error as to the date.  The feast of Saint Athanasius, as he showed from a calendar shoved beneath a quantity of vintners’ cards on his study-table, fell on the second of May, and could not be celebrated before the evening of the first.  It was now the thirtieth of April.  He invited us, then, for the next day at dinner, warning us at the same time that the evening of that same morrow would see him on his way to the Falls of Schaffhausen.  This idea of dining with an absentee puzzled me.

[Illustration:  The beggar who drank champagne.]

We both laughed heartily at the engineer’s mistake of twenty-four hours, and he for his part made me his excuses.

Athanasius—­whose name I obstinately keep, because it gives him, as I maintain, a more distinct individuality,—­Athanasius happened to be driving out for the purpose of collecting some friends whom he was about to accompany to Schaffhausen, and whom he had invited to dinner.  He contrived to stow away two in his buggy, and the rest assembled in his chambers.  We dined gayly and voraciously, and I hardly regretted even that old hotel-dinner at Interlaken, when the landlord waited on us in his green coat, and when Mary Ashburton was by my side, and when I praised hotel-dinners because one can say so much there without being overheard.

Dinner over, we went out for a stroll through the town.  The city of Epernay offers little remarkable except its Rue du Commerce, flanked with enormous buildings, and its church, conspicuous only for a flourishing portal in the style of Louis XIV., in perfect contradiction to the general architecture of the old sanctuary.  The environs were little note worthy at the season, for a vineyard-land has this peculiarity—­its veritable spring, its pride of May, arrives in the autumn.

[Illustration:  Admiration.]

One very vinous trait we found, however, in the person of a beggar.  He was sitting on Grandstone’s steps as we emerged.  Aged hardly fourteen, he had turned his young nose toward the rich fumes coming up from the kitchen with a look of sensuality and indulgence that amused me.  The maid, on a hint of mine, gave him a biscuit and the remainders of our bottles emptied into a bowl.  A smile of extreme breadth and intelligence spread over his face.  Opening his bag, he laid by the biscuit, and extracted