comfortable meal."

Whitwell laughed for joy in the bold figure.

"I'll tell you. When you've landed and crossed up from Liverpool, and
struck London, you feel as if you'd gone to sea again. It's an ocean--a
whole Atlantic of houses."

"That's right!" crowed Whitwell. "That's the way I thought it was.
Growin' any?"

Jeff hesitated. "It grows in the night. You've heard about Chicago
growing?"

"Yes."

"Well, London grows a whole Chicago every night."

"Good!" said Whitwell. "That suits me. And about Paris, now. Paris strike
you the same way?"

"It don't need to," said Jeff. "That's a place where I'd like to live.
Everybody's at home there. It's a man's house and his front yard, and I
tell you they keep it clean. Paris is washed down every morning; scrubbed
and mopped and rubbed dry. You couldn't find any more dirt than you could
in mother's kitchen after she's hung out her wash. That so, Mr.
Westover?"

Westover confirmed in general Jeff's report of the cleanliness of Paris.

"And beautiful! You don't know what a good-looking town is till you
strike Paris. And they're proud of it, too. Every man acts as if he owned
it. They've had the statue of Alsace in that Place de la Concorde of
yours, Mr. Whitwell, where they had the guillotine all draped in black
ever since the war with Germany; and they mean to have her back, some
day."

"Great country, Jombateeste!" Whitwell shouted to the Canuck.

The little man roused himself from the muse in which he was listening and
smoking. "Me, I'm Frantsh," he said.

"Yes, that's what Jeff was sayin'," said Whitwell. "I meant France."

"Oh," answered Jombateeste, impatiently, "I thought you mean the Hunited
State."

"Well, not this time," said Whitwell, amid the general laughter.

"Good for Jombateeste," said Jeff. "Stand up for Canada every time, John.
It's the livest country, in the world three months of the year, and the
ice keeps it perfectly sweet the other nine."

Whitwell could not brook a diversion from the high and serious inquiry
they had entered upon. "It must have made this country look pretty slim
when you got back. How'd New York look, after Paris?"

"Like a pigpen," said Jeff. He left his chair and walked round the table
toward a door opening into the adjoining room. For the first time
Westover noticed a figure in white seated there, and apparently rapt in
the talk which had been going on. At the approach of Jeff, and before he
could have made himse