rough the guarantee which the great New Orleans banking house
was always ready to give.

"What is that fine building?" I said, pointing to a picture on the
wall.

"Oh! that is the 'Hospice de Sainte Priscille,' which Antoine has
erected in Paris. People there call it 'La Marquise.'"

"By the way," said Priscilla's mother, who sat by, "Antoine is coming
to see us next month, and is to look after his Slabtown friends when he
comes. They used to call him at first 'Priscilla's Frenchman.'"

And to this day Miss More declares that markusses is a thing she can't
no ways understand.

_1871._

TALKING FOR LIFE.

For many years following the war I felt that I owed a grudge to the
medical faculty. Having a romantic temperament and a taste for heroics,
I had wished to fight and eat hard tack for my country. But whenever I
presented the feeble frame in which I then dwelt, the medical man stood
in my path with the remonstrance, "Why should you fill another cot in a
hospital and another strip in the graveyard?" In these late years I
have been cured of my regrets; not by service-pension slogans and
pension agents' circulars, as you may imagine, but by the war
reminiscence which has flooded the magazines, invaded every social
circle, and rendered the listener's life a burden. In any group of men
of my own age, North or South, I do not dare introduce any military
topic, not even the Soudan campaign of General Wolseley, or the East
Indian yarns of Private Mulvaney, lest I should bring down upon my head
stories of campaigning on the Shenandoah, the Red River, or the
Rappahannock--stories that have gained like rolling snowballs during
the rolling years. Not that the war reminiscence is inherently
tedious, but it is frightfully overworked. A scientific friend of mine
of great endurance has discovered, by a series of prolonged
observations and experiments at the expense of his own health, that
only one man in twenty-seven hundred and forty-six can tell a story
well, and that only one in forty-three can narrate a personal
experience bearably. If I had gone into the army the chances are
forty-two to one that I should have bored my friends intolerably from
that day to this, and twenty-seven hundred and forty-five to one
against my stories having anything engaging in them. I thank Heaven for
the medical man that made me stay at home.

But once in a while it has been my luck to meet among old soldiers the
twenty-seven hundred a