should be taken in. Zeln, as any history would tell you, as any

   old atlas would show you, was a little independent duchy in the center of Germany."

   "Poor dear thing! Like Jonah in the center of the whale," he murmured, sympathetically.

   "Hush. Don't interrupt. Zeln was a little independent German duchy, and the Duke of Zeln was its sovereign. After the war with France it was absorbed by Prussia. But the ducal family still rank as royal highness. Of course, you've heard of the Leczinskis?"

   "Lecz—what?" said he.

   "Leczinski," she repeated.

   "How do you spell it?"

   "L-e-c-z-i-n-s-k-i."

   "Good. Capital. You have a real gift for spelling," he exclaimed.

   "Will you be quiet," she said, severely, "and answer my question? Are you familiar with the name?"

   "I should never venture to be familiar with a name I didn't know," he asserted.

   "Ah, you don't know it? You have never heard of Stanislas Leczinska, who was king of Poland? Of Marie Leczinska, who married Louis VI?"

   "Oh, to be sure. I remember. The lady whose portrait one sees at Versailles."

   "Quite so. Very well," she continued, "the last representative of the Leczinskis, in the elder line, was the Princess Anna Leczinska, who, in 1858, married the Duke of Zeln. She was the daughter of John Leczinski, Duke of Grodnia and Governor of Galicia, and of the Archduchess Henrietta d'Este, a cousin of the Emperor of Austria. She was also a great heiress, and an extremely handsome woman. But the Duke of Zeln was a bad lot, a viveur, a gambler, a spendthrift. His wife, like a fool, made her entire fortune over to him, and he

   proceeded to play ducks and drakes with it. By the time their son was born he'd got rid of the last farthing. Their son wasn't born till '63, five years after their marriage. Well, and then, what do you suppose the 

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