e it's white.--Oh! there's black snow, you
know.--Yes, but that's the bad snow." There's fine conversation for you;
Mademoiselle Catherine's tongue goes nineteen to the dozen. Still I have
one fault to find with her; she talks all the time to the same visitor,
who is pretty and wears a fine frock.

There she is wrong. A good hostess is equally gracious to all her
guests. She treats them all with affability, and if she shows any
particular preference, it is to the more retiring and the less
prosperous. We should flatter the unhappy; it is the only flattery
allowable. But Catherine has discovered this for herself. She has
guessed the secret of true politeness: a kind heart is everything. She
pours out tea for the company, and forgets nobody. On the contrary, she
presses the dolls that are poor and unhappy and shy to help themselves
to invisible cakes and sandwiches made of dominoes.

Some day Catherine will hold a salon where the old French courtesy will
live again.

LITTLE SEA-DOGS

[Illustration: 198]

THEY are sailor boys, regular little sea-dogs. Look at them; they have
their caps pulled down over their ears so that the gale blowing in from
the sea and bringing the spindrift with it may not deafen them with its
dreadful howling. They wear heavy woollen clothes to keep out the cold
and wet. Their patched pea-jacket and breeches have been their elders'
before them. Most of their garments have been contrived out of old
things of their father's. Their soul is likewise of the same stuff as
their father's; it is simple, brave, and long-suffering. At birth they
inherited a single-hearted, noble temper. Who and what gave it them?
After God and their parents, the Sea. The Sea teaches sailors courage by
teaching them to face danger. It is a rough but kindly instructor.

That is why our little sailor-boys, though their hearts are childlike
still, have the spirit of gallant veterans. Elbows on the parapet of the
sea-wall, they gaze out into the offing. It is more than the blue line
marking the faint division between sea and sky that they see. Their eyes
care little for the soft, changing colours of the ocean or the vast,
contorted masses of the clouds. What they see, as they look seawards,
is something more moving than the hue of the waves or the shape of the
clouds; it is a suggestion of human love. They are spying for the boats
that sailed away for the fishing; presently they will loom again on the
horizon, laden w