now, over a good many lively and interesting
political conflicts in the United States, leads me to believe that
liberal contributions of this sort are, as a rule, more easily collected
by the beneficiaries of a more or less unscrupulous Government actually
in power, than by the disinterested advocates of a real political
reformation.

We wound up the day of the Conference with a delightful little dinner at
St.-Quentin. The traditions of the old French _cuisine_ are not yet
extinct in the provinces, nor, for that matter, in the private life of
the true Parisians of Paris. They all centre in the famous saying of
Brillat-Savarin, that a man may learn how to cook, but must be born to
roast--a saying worthy of the philosophic magistrate who, coming to
America, under the impression that he was to be fed upon roots and raw
meat, went back to France convinced that a New England roast turkey and
an Indian pudding were not to be matched in the old world. It is one of
the many curious things of this curious world of the nineteenth century,
that a _cuisine_ of made dishes of which Grimod de La Reyniere long ago
gave us the origin, in the downfall of the kitchens of the
prince-bishops along the Rhine, should be gravely and generally accepted
by Frenchmen themselves, or at least by the Parisians of literature and
the boulevards, as the national _cuisine_ of France. The charming
daughter of my host at St.-Quentin knew better; and she received with a
graceful, housewifely satisfaction the neatly-turned compliments which
one of the guests was old-fashioned and sensible enough to pay her upon
the skill of her cook.

The city of Aire-sur-la-Lys itself, like St.-Omer, shows traces still of
its connection with Flanders and with Spain. I do not know if it is true
of Aire as M. Lauwereyns de Roosendaele, writing about Jacqueline
Robins, declares it to be of St.-Omer, that there are people there, even
now, who think of the days of the Spanish rule as the 'good old times.'
But there is a certain Castilian stateliness about the older buildings
of Aire; and the portals of the larger residences, leading from the
street into charming secluded courts, gay with trees and flowers, remind
one of the zaguans of the Andalusian houses. Very Spanish, too, is the
Jesuit Church, despite some extraordinary decorations due to the zeal of
its more recent possessors.

The Flemish past of the city is commemorated especially by a very
remarkable little buildin