great name in France. Then it was the
favorite resort of Americans; and although I was learning the phrases
in Blagdon as fast as I could, I still found English by far the most
agreeable means of communication for everything beyond an appeal to the
waiter for more wood or a clean towel. Table d'Hote, too, brought us
all together, with an abundant, if not a rich, harvest of personal
experiences gathered during the day from every quarter of the teeming
city. Bradford was there with his handsome face and fine figure,--an old
resident, as it then seemed to me; for he had been abroad two years, and
could speak what sounded to my ears as French-like as any French I had
ever heard. Poor fellow! scarce three years had passed when he laid him
down to his last sleep in a convent of Jerusalem, without a friend to
smooth his pillow or listen to his last wishes. Of most of the others
the names have escaped me; but I shall never forget how wide I opened
my eyes, one evening, at the assertion of a new-comer, that he had done
more for the enlightenment of France than any man living or dead. The
incomparable gravity with which the assertion was made drew every eye to
the speaker, who, after enjoying our astonishment for a while, told us
that he had been the first to send out a whaler from Havre, and had
secured almost a monopoly of the oil-trade. Some years afterwards I made
a passage with his brother, and learned from him the history of
this Yankee enterprise, which had filled two capacious purses, and
substituted the harpoon for the pruning-knife, the whale-ship for the
olive-orchard, in the very stronghold of the emblem of peace; and now
the collier with his pickaxe has driven them both from the field. But
the Petit Hotel Montmorenci did not wait for the change. Its broad court
was never enlivened by gas. Its tables and mantels were decked to the
last hour with the alabaster whiteness of those pure wax tapers which
shed such a soft light upon your book, and grew up into such formidable
items in your bills. A long passage--one of those luxuries of rainy,
muddy Paris, lined with stores that you cannot help lingering over, if
for nothing else, to wonder at the fertility of the human brain when it
makes itself the willing minister of human caprice--covers the whole
space which the hotel stood on, and unites the Neuve St. Marc with the
once distant Boulevard.

As I passed the porter's lodge, he handed me a letter. The hand was one
that I