When the repast was fully over, Speranski, pouring out a glass of Tokay from a bottle which bore the impress of the Black Eagle of the House of Hapsburg, and which had evidently been arrested on its road to the Emperor's table, ordered one of the pedlars to give him the papers, "which," said he, with a smile, "that Turkish courier _mislaid_ where he slept last night." A small packet was handed to him;--he perused it over and over with a vigilant eye, but it was obvious, without any of the results which he expected; for, after a few minutes' pause, during which he examined every part of the case in which they were enclosed, he threw the letters aside. "What," said he, in a disappointed tone, "was to be expected from those opium-eaters? Yet they are shrewd in their generation, and the scandals of the harem, the propitious day for shaving the Sultan's head, the lucky star for combing his illustrious beard, or the price of a dagger-hilt, are as good topics as any that pass in our own diplomacy. Here, Sturnwold, put back this circumcised nonsense into its case, and send it, do you hear, by one of our _own_ couriers, to the Turkish secretary at Vienna; let it be thrown on his pillow, or tied to his turban, just as you please; but, at all events, we must not do the business like a clumsy cabinet messenger. Now, begone; and you, Heinrich, hand me the Turk's meerschaum."
The bandit brought him a very handsome pipe, which he said would probably be more suited to the Turk's tobacco, of which he had deposited a box upon the table. Speranski took the pipe, but, at his first experiment, he found the neck obstructed. His quick conception ascertained the point at once. Cutting the wood across, he found a long roll of paper within. He glanced over its contents, instantly sprang up, ordered the attendance of half a dozen of "his friends" on horseback, looked to the priming of his pistols, and galloped off through the forest.
On the evening of one of the most sultry days of July, and in one of the most delicious yet most lonely spots of the Carpathian hills, a trampling of hoofs, and a jingling of horse-furniture, and a confusion of loud and dissonant voices, announced that strangers were at hand. The sounds told true, for, gradually emerging from the glade covered with terebinth trees, wild vines that hung their rich and impenetrable folds over elms, hazels, and cypress, like draperies of green and brown silk over the pillars of some Oriental palace, came a long train of sumpter mules, led horses, and Albanian grooms; next came a more formidable group of horsemen, the body-guards of the Hospodar of Moldavia, sent to escort Mohammed Ali Hunkiar, the Moslem ambassador, through the Bannat; and then came, seated on the Persian charger given to him from the stables of the Padishah, the brother of the Sun and father of the Moon, Sultan Selim, the most mighty--a little bitter-visaged old Turk, with the crafty countenance of the hereditary hunchbacks of the great city of the faithful. Nothing could be more luxurious than the hour, the golden sunset; nothing lovelier than its light streaming in a thousand rays, shifts and shapes of inimitable lustre through the blooms and foliage of the huge ravine; and nothing less lovely or more luxurious than the little old ambassador, who had earned his elevation from a cobbler's stall to the Divan, by his skill in cutting off heads, and had now earned his appointment to the imperial embassy, by his dexterity in applying a purse of ten thousand sequins to the conscience of the slipper-bearer to the slipper-bearer of his highness the Vizier.