makes us
faithful in the smallest things. She says she is determined that
Uncle Jack shall have a full and circumstantial report from me of all
that he wants to know about the celebrated places here, and I really
think he will, if I go on, or am goaded on, in this way. It's pure
devotion to the cause in Fanny, for you know she doesn't care for
such things herself, and has no pleasure in it but carrying a point.
Her chief consolation under her trial of keeping still is to see how
I look in her different dresses. She sighs over me as I appear in a
new garment, and says, O, if she only had the dressing of me! Then
she gets up and limps and hops across the room to where I stand
before the glass, and puts a pin here and a ribbon there, and gives
my hair (which she has dressed herself) a little dab, to make it lie
differently, and then scrambles back to her sofa, and knocks her lame
ankle against something, and lies there groaning and enjoying herself
like a martyr. On days when she thinks she is never going to get
well, she says she doesn't know why she doesn't give me her things at
once and be done with it; and on days when she thinks she is going to
get well right away, she says she will have me one made something
like whatever dress I have got on, as soon as she's home. Then up
she'll jump again for the exact measure, and tell me the history of
every stitch, and how she'll have it altered just the least grain,
and differently trimmed to suit my complexion better; and ends by
having promised to get me something not in the least like it. You
have some idea already of what Fanny is; and all you have got to do
is to multiply it by about fifty thousand. Her sprained ankle simply
intensifies her whole character.

Besides helping to compose Fanny's expeditionary corps, and really
exerting himself in the cause of Uncle Jack, as he calls it, Dick is
behaving beautifully. Every morning, after breakfast, he goes over to
the hotel, and looks at the arrivals and reads the newspapers, and
though we never get anything out of him afterwards, we somehow feel
informed of all that is going on. He has taken to smoking a clay pipe
in honor of the Canadian fashion, and he wears a gay, barbaric scarf
of Indian muslin wound round his hat and flying out behind; because
the Quebeckers protect themselves in that