"She is the Countess Rossi, whom you may have heard of as Mademoiselle Sontag." "What! the celebrated Sontag ?" I exclaimed.
"The same.

And the gentleman to whom she is now speaking is no less famous a person than the author of _Pelham_." I was as much delighted as a rustic at a menagerie, and Dalrymple, seeing this, continued to point out one celebrity after another till I began no longer to remember which was which.

Thus Lamartine, Horace Vernet, Scribe, Baron Humboldt, Miss Bremer, Arago, Auber, and Sir Edwin Landseer, were successively indicated, and I thought myself one of the most fortunate fellows in Paris, only to be allowed to look upon them.
"I suppose the spirit of lion-hunting is an original instinct," I said, presently.

"Call it vulgar excitement, if you will; but I must confess that to see these people, and to be able to write about them to my father, is just the most delightful thing that has happened to me since I left home." "Call things by their right names, Damon," said Dalrymple, good-naturedly.

"If you were a _parvenu_ giving a party, and wanted all these fine folks to be seen at your house, that would be lion-hunting; but being whom and what you are, it is hero-worship--a disease peculiar to the young; wholesome and inevitable, like the measles." "What have I done," said a charming voice close by, "that Captain Dalrymple will not even deign to look upon me ?" The charming voice proceeded from the still more charming lips of an exceedingly pretty brunette in a dress of light green silk, fastened here and there with bouquets of rosebuds.