“Then I shall accompany you. I have to speak to you on a very important subject.”
“I am going to the Turkish divan.”
“The very place I like,—it’s private, snug, genteel; one can be there without meeting a reporter.”
It was now seven o’clock. The sun had risen over an infinite canopy of dense vapours, through which his rays of burning light were dissolved into a dark lurid hue which hung like smoke on the red walls of the buildings. The thermometer stood 98° in the shade. After a short walk, which, owing to the excessive sultriness of the air, proved sufficiently fatiguing, we arrived at the coffee-house. The entrée was somewhat dérobée, for the evident purpose of concealing it from the eyes of the vulgar; and the establishment being on the second floor, and the staircase dark and narrow, none but one initiated into the secret could have found the way to it. We ascended the stairs, opened the folding-doors, and in another moment found ourselves in an elegant apartment, studded with marble tables and stuffed couches, in which a sort of chiaroscuro—the window-shutters being but half opened, and the windows concealed by a rich damask drapery,—gave full effect to the numerous oil-paintings that covered the walls. Some of these, we were told by the waiter, were of high value, being “genuine originals;” but my friend, who passed for a connoisseur in these matters, merely tossed up his head, and said he knew all about them.
“Have you seen the invoice?” demanded the waiter.
“It’s no matter,” replied my friend; “you had better give us some coffee.”
We stretched ourselves each on an ottoman (chairs being entirely banished from the establishment), and “the Author” at once came to the point.
“I wanted to hand you my sketch-book,” said he, after heaving a deep sigh, “containing the journal of a tour through the principal Atlantic cities, and a few memorandums of my stay in Washington.”
“Ah! have you finally resolved to publish it?”
“Not I. I am a married man, related to one of the most aristocratic families in town, with the prospect of inheriting a fortune. I must not quarrel with my bread and butter.”