rms. Perhaps a satiric observer of manners might
have thought her more like a lady's-maid than a lady. A suggestion of
pertness in her beady eyes, and a certain superciliousness of bearing
were mingled with a coquetry not displeasing to one who surveyed her
from the human height. To look important is pretty generally to feel
important, but is, by no means, to be important. We discern this fact
with curious clearness when we look at other people, but it is nowhere
quite so evident as in what we call the brute creation. (As if we didn't
belong to it!) Perhaps there are intelligences who look at us with just
such a pitying amusement and analysis--_our_ prosperous relatives, who
started earlier in the race of life than we did, and met with better
chances.

In spite of airs and graces, natural and acquired, Lil's claims to
purity of race were small, though, like my older acquaintance, Schwartz,
she was more a broken-haired terrier than anything else. Schwartz was
simply and purely _bourgeois_. He had no airs and no pretensions; but
Lil, whatever her genuine claims may have been, was of another stamp and
fashion.

It was Lil who was the cause of Monsieur Dorn's unbending. The fat old
_gendarme_ was putting her through a set of tricks, which she executed
with complete _aplomb_ and intelligence. There was nothing violent in
these exercises; nothing a dog of the best breeding in the world could
have felt to derogate from dignity. She was much petted and applauded
for her performances, and was rewarded by two or three lumps of sugar,
which she ate without any of the vulgar haste characteristic of most
dogs in their dealings with sweetmeats.

The language of the peasantry hereabouts is that same Walloon tongue
in which old Froissart wrote his _Chronicles_. It is little more
comprehensible to the average Frenchman than to the average Englishman,
but its vocabulary is restricted, and the people who talk it have
enriched (or corrupted) it with many words of French. When the loungers
in the _cafe_ began to talk, as they did presently, it amused me to
listen to this unknown tongue; and whenever I heard '_la procession_'
named, I enjoyed much the kind of refreshment Mr. Gargery experienced
when he encountered a J.O., Jo, in the course of his general reading.
_La procession_ was not merely the staple of the village talk, but the
warp and woof of it, and any intruding strand of foreign fancy was
cut short at the dips of him who strove