There!"

"It will not be so bad as--"

But I never finished the sentence. An imperative gesture closed my lips
physically as well as metaphorically, and I was glad to turn the subject
enough to sit down to tea with the children. After the bread and butter
we agreed what we might and what we might not tell, and then I wrote
what the reader is now to see.

CHAPTER III.

MY LIFE TO ITS CRISIS.

New-Yorkers of to-day see so many processions, and live through so many
sensations, and hurrah for so many heroes in every year, that it is only
the oldest of fogies who tells you of the triumphant procession of
steamboats which, in the year 1824, welcomed General Lafayette on his
arrival from his tour through the country he had so nobly served.

But, if the reader wishes to lengthen out this story he may button the
next silver-gray friend he meets, and ask him to tell of the broken
English and broken French of the Marquis, of Levasseur, and the rest of
them; of the enthusiasm of the people and the readiness of the visitors,
and he will please bear in mind that of all that am I.

For it so happened that on the morning when, for want of better lions to
show, the mayor and governor and the rest of them took the Marquis and
his secretary, and the rest of them, to see the orphan asylum in Deering
Street,--as they passed into the first ward, after having had "a little
refreshment" in the managers' room, Sally Eaton, the head nurse, dropped
the first courtesy to them, and Sally Eaton, as it happened, held me
screaming in her arms. I had been sent to the asylum that morning with a
paper pinned to my bib, which said my name was Felix Carter.

"Eet ees verra fine," said the Marquis, smiling blandly.

"Ravissant!" said Levasseur, and he dropped a five-franc piece into
Sally Eaton's hand. And so the procession of exhibiting managers talking
bad French, and of exhibited Frenchmen talking bad English, passed on;
all but good old Elkanah Ogden--God bless him!--who happened to have
come there with the governor's party, and who loitered a minute to talk
with Sally Eaton about me.

Years afterwards she told me how the old man kissed me, how his eyes
watered when he asked my story, how she told again of the moment when I
was heard screaming on the doorstep, and how she offered to go and bring
the paper which had been pinned to my bib. But the old man said it was
no matter,--"only we would have called him Marquis," said he, "if his
na