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 measuring with his eyes the sympathy of his hearers.

So time flowed on. A tiny waiter kept bringing the dark-brown fluid in glasses with colored lids. There was a subdued murmur around the table, and the tobacco smoke hovered in bluish cireles about the lights.

The conversation became more trifling. Now Jiří, now the doctor, or the apothecary, dropped a few remarks. Our nobility was condemned by all. Our strength and our salvation lay only in a pure demacracy. In half a century there would be no such thing as aristocracy, just as America no longer had any.

Merchant Jiskra spoke in elegiac tones of that real aristocracy of our blood which went down on the Old-Town Square, or was drowned in a far-off, foreign sea.

A weak smile appeared on the doctor’s