knows, or ought to know, the ambassadors, the
secretaries of legation, and the attaches
accredited to the court of St. James's, mingle on a
charmingly social footing with sundry illustrious
Englishmen, whose qualifications as Pilgrims
must be simply these: to have travelled ten
thousand miles in a straight direction, and in a
given line from the North Pole; to be faultless
hands at écarté, piquet, and short whist, and to
belong to the cream of the cream of English
society, both by wealth, by birth, and by
position.

There are always a good many candidates
up at the Pilgrims' Club—where gentlemen's
names are put down when they are infants in
arms, with a view to their entering the club at
their grand climacteric;—but as failures in one
of the three grand and essential requisites are
sometimes unavoidable, the rejection of
candidates at the Pilgrims' Club (which is, I think,
near the Piccadilly end of Park-lane) is not by
any means of rare occurrence. Indeed, they
say there is more blackballing at the P. (the
affectionate diminutive of Pilgrim) than at any
other club in London: always excepting the
Ostrich in Sandys-street, Deseret-square. There,
you know, they pilled Sir Eurasius Quihi for
his loose notions on the subject of suttee, and
all but ostracised brave old Admiral Sindbad,
because he was known to maintain that curry
was better without chutnee than with it. For
distinctions must be made, it is plain, to keep
society select—which would otherwise
degenerate into a mere anarchical Odd Fellows'
gathering of the most ungenteel description: and it
is a good and holy thing to be exclusive.
Thus, as you see, the Pilgrims had secured the
very cream of the cream in their English
memberhood.

Well, and the foreigners. One must make
allowances for foreigners, of course. If Baron
Burstoff, Minister Plenipotentiary from Crim
Tartary, had formerly been simply a Hebrew
money-changer at Frankfort-on-the-Maine (the
letters we used to have from him about the
Imperial High Dutch lottery, and urging us
forthwith to invest in that swindle, and win a
castle on the Rhine, the title of Count, and the
entire library of the late lamented Puffendorff!);
if old Professor Stradivarius from Jena, the
distinguished philologist and translator of the
poems of Saadi into the Zummerzetzhire dialect,
and the Post-Office London Directory of eighteen
hundred and forty-two into Syro-Chaldaic, was
the son of a tripe-dealer at Magdeburg, and
had, in early life followed the humble trade of a
tailor; and if that famous traveller, Marcus
Rolopolus, Ph.D., R.G.S., &c. &c., had been
assistant-keeper of a wild beast show
(travelling, and occasionally varied by the beefeater
business outside), a dealer in stuffed birds in
the vicinity of Goodman's-fields, and the
proprietor of a sailors' boarding-house at Gibraltar,
before he discovered the site of the lost city of
Alesia, brought back the original pleadings of
the Abderites in the great lawsuit of the ass's
shadow, and made it manifest to the entire world
that the wild Wangdoodlums do not eat human
flesh when roast hippopotamus is procurable;
and that they do knock out their front teeth to
be the better able to whistle their native airs—
if the savants and the illustrious strangers who
were made free of the P., and nearly threw the
waiters into fits by spitting on the carpet of the
morning-room, were sometimes of mean
extraction, and occasionally of coarse manners, and
now and then humbugs, the great principle of
exclusiveness was at least outwardly vindicated.
Once a Pilgrim always a Pilgrim; and the
gown and scrip and sandalled shoon covered a
multitude of sins.

Yes: the Sultan Greyfaunt had found his
proper groove in life, and became it admirably.
The groove was anointed with the most
delicately scented unguent: pommade divine, at
least. It was a groove beginning very high up
indeed in the social scale, and you slid down it,
as down that famous One Tree Hill of antiquity:
Avernus.

After a time, Edgar left Pomeroy's Hotel.
He did not complain of the costliness of its
accommodation—(I think a mutton-chop costs
a guinea there, and a bottle of soda-water three-
and-sixpence, and I know a one-horse brougham
is two pounds ten an hour); but, intending to
reside permanently in London, it was, of course,
idle to remain in an hotel. So Mr. Constant,
whom the sultan deigned to patronise in the
most benignant manner, found for his
illustrious guest a handsome suite of chambers in
St. James's-place; supplied him with a perfect
pearl of a washerwoman, who enamelled shirts,
iced white waistcoats, frosted pocket-
handkerchiefs, and turned cravats into snow-flakes in
the most beautiful manner; and, in addition,
recommended him a body-servant—a very jewel
of a body-servant—a young man by the name
of Hummelhausen, said to be a distant relation
of the proprietor of Pomeroy's, who shaved,
dressed hair, varnished boots, compounded
curious restoratives on the mornings after heavy
dinners, found out the addresses of people
whom he had seen but once in his life, and then
only on the Serpentine's banks, played on the
guitar, and was worth his weight in gold
generally.

Could there be a more fortunate youth
than the Sultan Greyfaunt, with his health, his
figure, his genius, his ready money, his pearl of
a laundress, his jewel of a body-servant, and his
coronet upon his card? His name was down at
the P. He often dined there. His election
was considered certain, owing to the influence
of Sir Timotheus O'Boy, that great collector of
musical instruments, who is said to have nine
of Father Schmidt's organs down at his place
in Devonshire, and the original anvil beaten by
the Harmonious Blacksmith in his smoking-
room in Curzon-street. Some of the best
houses in London were open to Edgar. Some
of the prettiest faces in London smiled at him
from carnage windows. "Oh king! live for
ever!" cries the Eastern adulator. The Sultan
Greyfaunt would have been but very slightly