ake his guests welcome,
that, from indigestion, he would be puffing and blowing, an hour
afterwards, for breath.

"'As I have begun the family visits,' continued the Emperor, 'I must not
pass by the Archduchess Mariana and the Lady Abbess at Clagenfurt; or,
the Lord knows, I shall never hear the end of their klagens.--[A German
word which signifies complaining.]--The first, I am told, is grown so
ugly, and, of course, so neglected by mankind, that she is become an
utter stranger to any attachment, excepting the fleshy embraces of the
disgusting wen that encircles her neck and bosom, and makes her head
appear like a black spot upon a large sheet of white paper. Therefore
klagen is all I can expect from that quarter of female flesh, and I dare
say it will be levelled against the whole race of mankind for their want
of taste in not admiring her exuberance of human craw!

"'As to the Lady Abbess, she is one of my best recruiting sergeants. She
is so fond of training cadets for the benefit of the army that they learn
more from her system in one month than at the military academy at
Neustadt in a whole year. She is her mother's own daughter. She
understands military tactics thoroughly. She and I never quarrel, except
when I garrison her citadel with invalids. She and the canoness,
Mariana, would rather see a few young ensigns than all the staffs of the
oldest Field-marshals!'

"The Queen often made signs to the Emperor to desist from thus exposing
every member of his family, and seemed to feel mortified; but the more
Her Majesty endeavoured to check his freedom, and make him silent, the
more he enlarged upon the subject. He did not even omit Maria Theresa,
who, he said, in consequence of some papers found on persons arrested as
spies from the Prussian camp, during the seven years' war, was reported
to have been greatly surprised to have discovered that her husband, the
Emperor Francis I., supplied the enemy's army with all kinds of provision
from her stores.

"The King scarcely ever answered excepting when the Emperor told the
Queen that her staircase and antechamber at Versailles resembled more the
Turkish bazars of Constantinople than a royal palace. 'But,' added he,
laughing, 'I suppose you would not allow the nuisance of hawkers and
pedlars almost under your nose, if the sweet perfumes of a handsome
present did not compensate for the disagreeable effluvia exhaling from
their filthy traffic.'

[It was an old c