r Joseph.

This was the hour at which, in England, we would sip a cup of tea as
an excuse for talk with a pretty woman in her drawing-room; but having
tramped steadily for some hours in mountain air, I was in a mood to
understand the tastes of that class who like an egg or a kipper for "a
relish to their tea." I looked for the landlady with the illustrious
ancestors, and could not find her; but voices on the floor above led
me to the stairway. I mounted, passed a doorway, and found myself in a
room which instinct told me had been the scene of the historic
_dejeuner_.

It was a low-ceilinged room with wainscoted walls, and at first glance
one received an impression of the past. There was a soft lustre of
much-polished mahogany, and a glitter of old silver candelabra; I
thought that I detected a faint fragrance of lavender lurking in the
clean curtains, or perhaps it might have come from the square of
ancient damask covering the table, on which a meal was spread.

That meal consisted of chicken; a salad of pale green lettuce and
coraline tomatoes; a slim-necked bottle of white wine; a custard with
a foaming crest of beaten egg and sugar; and a dish of purple figs.
Food for the gods, and with only a boy to eat it--but a remarkable
boy. I gazed, and did not know what to make of him. He also gazed at
me, but his look lacked the curiosity with which I honoured him. It
expressed frank and (in the circumstances) impudent disapproval.
Having bestowed it, he nonchalantly continued his conversation with
the plump and capped landlady, who was evidently enraptured with him,
while I was left to stand unnoticed on the threshold.

Purely from the point of view of the picturesque, there was some
excuse for madame's preoccupation. The boy would have delighted an
artist, no doubt, though our first interchange of glances gave me a
strong desire to smack him.

His panama--a miniature copy of mine--hung over the back of his
old-fashioned chair--the one, no doubt, in which Napoleon had sat to
eat the _dejeuner_. Soft rings of dark, chestnut hair, richly bright
as Japanese bronze, had been flattened across his forehead by the now
discarded hat. This hair, worn too long for any self-respecting,
twentieth-century boy, curled round his small head and behind the slim
throat, which was like a stem for the flower of his strange little
face. "Strange" was the first adjective which came into my mind; yet,
if he had been a girl instead of a boy,