rden; "but of course they
speak only a _patois_: they are Americans."

"Why say you always to your infant, 'Hurry, my darling'?" she asked one
day. "The pure Englishes says always, ''Urry, me darlink.'" Madame had
acquired her English from her defunct lord, a commercial traveller from
Lancashire.

One day, glancing at an envelope I had just addressed, she remarked,
"_Eh bien!_ you Americans are very like English, after all. In England
the last name of almost every monsieur is 'Esq.'!"

Another day she sweetly remarked, "This knife has very bad bladders."

As knives in our country are not generally endowed with that physical
possession, I could only stare my astonishment.

"Eh, I see! It is an _English_ word, and you do not understand it. It
means _lame_."

By which I discovered that had she spoken our transatlantic _patois_ she
would have said "_blades_."

Every one of our Relicts had her private sitting-room attached to her
bed-room, the house having been built expressly to suit the demands of
_bourgeois_ widows with fortunes. Thus our _salon_ was of very little
account until after dinner, when our widows, instead of returning to
their own rooms, the garden, or the boulevard, where they spent the day,
herded together around card-tables almost as closely as sheep in a pen.
The _salon_ was not intended for daytime use; in the bitterest weather
it had no fire until evening, and it had but a single window, which
looked out upon the pavement of a well-like court arched over, three
stories above, by a handkerchief bit of sky. Very little light or air
ever entered the box-like place; during the day its atmosphere was stale
and heavy, at night almost fetid. Whenever we ventured to pass an hour
there our struggle was always against fate. Slyly we would leave the one
door an inch ajar, or surreptitiously unclose the window a fraction as
much. Scarcely, however, had we begun to congratulate ourselves upon
success when half a score of antique roses flaunted and flared, and the
death-knell of sly hopes sounded with echoed and re-echoed cry: "_Mon
Dieu!_ I smell air!" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell you not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell
we not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smells she not air?" "_Mon Dieu!_ Smell they
not air?"

Almost all our _veuves_ had children and grandchildren in Paris, and we
were continually surprised to see the mundane elegance of these younger
branches of our withered old trees. It showed the usual history,
however, of _bourg