o exclusively of the 'West End.' You have lived among the
English; enter now into _my_ society." Mde. Fee smiled, and Mde. de
Rheims taking a look at me continued: "The stock is incomparable out of
France. Remember, my child, that your ancestors were grande noblesse,"
haughtily raising her head. A novel feeling of distinction was added to
my swelling current of new pleasures.

A ruddy, simply-dressed, black-haired lady, but of natural and cultured
manner, was now received by her with much cordiality, and I had an
opportunity to survey the whole concourse and continue my observations.
Brought up as I had been for the last few years, I found my own people
markedly foreign,--not so much in any obtrusive respect as in that
general atmosphere to which we often apply the term.

In the first place there was the language--not patois as of _habitants_
and barbers, nor the mode of the occasional caller at our house, whose
pronunciation seemed an individual exception; but an entire assemblage
holding intercourse in dainty Parisian, exquisite as the famous dialect
of the Brahmans. There was the graceful compliment, the antithetic
description, the witty repartee. One could say the poetical or
sententious without being insulted by a stare. Some of the ladies were
beautiful, some were not, but they had for the most part a quite ideal
degree of grace and many of them a kind of dignity not too often
elsewhere found. Every person laughed and was happy through the homely
cotillion that was proceeding. The feelings of the young seemed to issue
and mingle in sympathy, with a freedom naturally delightful to my
peculiar nature, and the triumphant strains of music excited my pulses.

Mde. De Rheims touched my arm and pointed individuals by name. "That
strong young man is a d'Irumberry--the pale one, a Le Ber--that young
girl's mother is a Guay de Boisbriant. Do not look at her partner, he is
some _canaille_."

There was, true enough, some difference. The descendants of gentry were
on the average marked with at least physical endowments quite distinctly
above the rest of the race. But there was a ridiculous side, for I
recognized some about whom my grandmother was used to make merry, such
as the youth who could "trace his ancestry five ways to Charles the
Fat," and the stout-built brothers in whose family there was a rule
"never to strike a man twice to knock him down.". My grandmother said
that "those who could _not_ knock him down kept the