y with my main
argument, households whose mistresses were patterns of what a
chatelaine should be. But I must leave that loop-hole for the critics,
for I am trying only to tell the truth and to be fair, and not to be
scientific or to bolster up a thesis.

I can see the big castle, centuries old, with its rambling buildings
winging away from it on every side, and in the court-yard its regal-looking
mistress positively garlanded with her dozen children. There
is no sign of the decadence of the aristocracy here. We sit down
twenty or more every day at the family luncheon. Tutors and
governesses are at every turn. A French abbe, as silken in manner and
speech as his own soutane, bowls over all my prejudices of creed and
custom, as I watch him rule with the lightest of hands and the softest
of voices a brood of termagant small boys; to turn from this to a game
of billiards, and from that to the Merry Widow waltz on the piano,
that we may dance. An aide-de-camp trained in India and a French abbe,
I am convinced that these are the apotheosis of luxury in a large
household. My Protestant brethren would, I am sure, throw their
prejudices to the winds could they spend an evening with my friend,
Monsieur l'Abbe! Nor Erasmus, nor Luther, nor Calvin would have had
the heart to burn him. He is just as good a fellow as we are, knows
far more, can turn his hand to anything from photography to the
driving of a stubborn pony, knows his world as few know it, and yet is
inviolably not of it. I have chatted with Jesuit priests teaching our
Western Indians; I have travelled with a preaching friar in Italy on
his round of sermonizing; I have seen them in South America, in India,
China, and Japan, and I recognize and acclaim their self-denying
prowess, but no one of them was a more dangerous missionary than my
last-named friend among them, Monsieur l'Abbe!

"For ever through life the Cure goes
With a smile on his kind old face--
With his coat worn bare, and his straggling hair,
And his green umbrella-case."

There was a profusion at this castle, a heartiness of welcome, a
patriarchal attitude toward the countless servants and satellites, an
acreage of roaming space in the buildings, that smacked of the
feudalism back to which both the castle and the family dated. How many
Englishmen or Americans who sniff at German civilization ever see
anything of the inside of German homes? Very few, I should judge, from
the lame talk and writin