colour, but of a vitality so great that it seemed as if each was a separate living entity, his features were somewhat insignificant. He had gray, rather thin whiskers, and iron-gray hair, still thick, and not yet deserting his forehead. His nose was slightly hooked, suggesting that a spoonful, perhaps, of Jewish blood ran in his veins; his mouth was very thin-lipped and compressed. In body, he was short and thin almost to meagreness, and, owing to a nearly total absence of digestive power, he lived practically exclusively on milk, of which he drank some five or six pints a day. And in nothing was his power of control so amazingly shown; for ten years ago he had been both gourmet and gourmand, and had habitually eaten enormous masses of food with a relish and palate for the curiously delicate and uncultivated sense of taste that Savarin might have envied. Even now, when he sat at the head of the table at his wife's parties, he knew, partly by keenness of nostril, partly by look, whether any dish was not perfectly cooked, and next morning the first of the slips which he dropped on to the floor to be picked up by the young man at the door might run: ' To the chef: Not enough asparagus-heads in the sauce Milanaise, Some three weeks ago I told you the same thing.—L. S. P.'
This extraordinary sense of, and attention to, detail, characteristic of the great Napoleon, was also most characteristic of Mr. Palmer. Only the night before his daughter had come down to dinner in a new dress, and found herself the instant target for the piercing gray eye of her father.
' There ought to be two straps on the shoulder, not one,' he said; ' it is copied from the figure of Madame Matignon, in the picture of the last fête of the Empress Eugenie. Pray have it altered.'
' Dear old pápa,' remarked Amelie, ' I dare say you know everything, but it wouldn't be so pretty.'
' That is a matter of taste, but it would be right.'
