ded that it is
impossible to be indifferent to it: one must either be very fond of it
or dislike it heartily. It was soon evident that Sir Robert belonged to
the first class and Mrs. Sykes to the second. Its brilliant blue skies,
and sunshine, and warmth, the lovely flowers, the good opera and better
restaurants, the infectious gayety of the people, as light about the
heart as the heels, with enough Gallic quicksilver in their veins to
give them a genius for being and looking happy, and, lastly, the warmth
of his reception, and a hospitality as refined as limitless, delighted
this most amiable of baronets. He had brought good letters, and was
admitted to that inner Creole circle which few strangers see, and in
which he found among the elders, as he said to Miss Noel, "the
atmosphere of the Faubourg Saint-Germain,--a dignity like that of the
period to which the Aglonbys belonged, with more grace and
_savoir-faire_. And such wonderfully pretty girls, my dear Augusta,
with eyes like sloes and skins like the petals of their own
magnolia-blossoms. And I observe a sort of patriarchal tribal state of
affairs among them,--grandparents, children, grandchildren, all living
together in great numbers and perfect amity, apparently." Among the
Americans of the city Sir Robert found much to interest him, and he went
to visit their "sugar-estates," took down in black and white the
astounding number of oranges that one tree is capable of producing, held
conversations with many gentlemen about the emancipated slaves, and with
many emancipated slaves about their late masters and present condition.
And then was there not cotton, the machinery employed on rice-, sugar-,
and cotton-plantations to "go, into"? to say nothing of the swamp-flora,
the possible introduction of olives into Louisiana, and Voodooism to
trace back to the Vaudois sorcerers of the fourteenth century and
connect with the serpent-worship of some parts of Italy, where he had
himself seen the peasants make their yearly procession with snakes
wrapped about their necks, waists, and wrists? And was there not, too,
serious business to be done? How could he secure and forward to England
a few things that he must have, such as a gar alligator, a pair of
mocking-birds, a Floridian flamingo, a ruby humming-bird, "a Texan
horned frog, with a distinctly-developed tail, crustaceous, probably
antediluvian, and credibly reported to live upon air," not to mention
other treasures, and coll