“Which still continues to flap over you shelteringly, madame,” I rejoined, somewhat flippantly, I fear, “and will to the end, no doubt; for, in its very organization, our country can never be subjected to the fluctuations of other lands—­revolt and revolution.”

“I am not so certain of this,” she observed, shaking her white head slowly as she spoke, and, lifting a pinch of snuff from her tortoise-shell box (the companion of her whole married life, as she acquainted us), she inhaled it with an air of meditative self-complacency, then offered it quietly to the gentlemen, who were still sitting over their wine and peaches; passing by Marion, Alice Durand, and myself, completely, in this ovation.

“Good snuff is not to be sneezed at,” said Major Favraud.  “None offered to young ladies, it seems,” taking a huge pinch, and thrusting it bravely up his nostrils, as one takes a spoonful of unpleasant medicine.  Then contradicting his own assertion immediately afterward, he succeeded in expelling most of it in a series of violent sternutatory spasms, which left him breathless, red-faced, and watery-eyed, with a handkerchief much begrimed.

But Madame Grambeau seemed not to have noticed this ridiculous proceeding, which, of course, created momentary mirth at the expense of the penitent Favraud, to whom Dr. Durand repeated the tantalizing saying, that “it is a royal privilege to take snuff gracefully”—­giving the example as he spoke, in a mock-heroic manner, quite as absurd and irrelevant as Favraud’s own.

Lost in deep thought, and gently tapping her snuffbox as she mused—­the tripod of her inspiration, as it seemed—­Madame Grambeau sat silently, with what memories of the past and what insight into the future none can know save those like herself grown hoary with wisdom and experience.

At last she spoke, addressing her remarks to me, as though the careless words I had hazarded had just been spoken, and the attention of her hearers undiverted by divers absurdities—­among others the affected gambols of Duganne—­anxious to place himself in an agreeable aspect before both of his inamoratas, past and present.

“I do not agree with you, mademoiselle.  I am one of those who think that in the very framing of this Constitution of ours the dragon’s teeth were sown, whose harvest is not yet produced.  Mr. Calhoun, with his prophetic eye, foresees that this crop of armed men is inevitable from such germs, as does Mr. Clay, were he only frank, which he is not, because he deludes himself—­the most incurable and inexcusable of all deceptions.”

And she applied herself again assiduously to her snuffbox, tapping it peremptorily before opening it, and, with a gloomy eye fixed on space, she continued: 

“In all lands, from the time of Cassandra and Jeremiah up, there have been prophets.  Prophets for good and prophets for ill—­of which some few have been God-appointed, and the sayings of such alone have been preserved.  The rest vanish away into oblivion like chaff before the wind—­never mind what their achievement, what their boast.