orely
tried, or her love of fun put under so unnatural a restraint. "_Calypso
ne pouvait se consoler_," over and over and over again, her rosy lips
moving slowly in order to give distinctness to every articulation, and
her blue eyes fairly dancing with repressed laughter at my awkward
imitation. If my teacher's patience could have given me a good
pronunciation, mine would have been perfect. Day after day she came back
to her task, and ever as the clock told nine would meet me at the door
with the same genial smile.

Nearly twenty years afterwards I found myself once more in Paris, and at
a large party at the house of the American Minister, the late Mr. King.
As I was wandering through the rooms, looking at group after group of
unknown faces, my eye fell upon one that I should have recognized at
once as that of my first teacher of French, if it had not seemed to me
impossible that twenty years could have passed over it so lightly.

"Who is that lady?" I asked of a gentleman near me, whom it was
impossible not to set down at once for an American.

"Why, that is Madame de ----, a grand-daughter of General Lafayette."

I can hardly account, at this quiet moment, for the sudden impulse that
seized me; but resist it I could not; and walking directly up to her, I
made my lowest bow, and, without giving her time to look me well in
the face, repeated, with all the gravity I could command, "_Calypso ne
pouvait se consoler du depart d'Ulysse_."

"O! Monsieur Greene," said she, holding out both her hands, "it must be
you!"

THE GENERAL.

General Lafayette had just entered his seventy-first year. In his
childhood he had been troubled by a weakness of the chest which gave his
friends some anxiety. But his constitution was naturally good, and air,
exercise, and exposure gradually wore away every trace of his original
debility. In person he was tall and strongly built, with broad
shoulders, large limbs, and a general air of strength, which was rather
increased than diminished by an evident tending towards corpulency.
While still a young man, his right leg--the same, I believe, that had
been wounded in rallying our broken troops at the Brandywine--was
fractured by a fall on the ice, leaving him lame for the rest of his
days. This did not prevent him, however, from walking about his farm,
though it cut him off from the use of the saddle, and gave a halt to his
gait, which but for his dignity of carriage would have approached