air they breathe. Take any continental town
—Tours, Nice, Pau, Ghent, Florence, Bad-
Ems, Bonn, — wherever the well-to-do English
form a colony, forthwith there sits down a
merchant to supply them with black dose and
blue pill. Religion (of a bitter aloes and
pepper admixture) comes next, a circulating
library next : consulate, perhaps, at last ;
but medicine is the primary necessary, and it
must be supplied. So Batten sold the
"pilcerul " and the " nig-mist " to the English
wayfarers in Paris. He had a very little wife,
who was, for a wonder, quite as timid as
himself. She used to cry a good deal. He had
a good many children who had taken to the
language, from their French bonne very
kindly, and squabbled with one another in a
delightful infantile jargon. Finally, he had
(confound her !) an Irish servant of all-work,
cook, housemaid, house-keeper, and major-
domo, who was tall, raw-boned, choleric and
red-elbowed, who was the tyrant of the whole
household — a most devout Catholic, a very
faithful, good, honest-hearted creature, and
the terror and torment of Batten's life.

My big brother was engaged to eat his
Christinas dinner with some great lady who
lived in a pavilion rouge hard by the Pare de
Monçeaux. By the way it was neither a
pavilion nor red, but was a great, staring,
whitewashed house. I never knew a people
(save, perhaps, the inhabitants of the Island
of Barataria) so prone as are the French to
call things by names which do not belong
to them. But Batten, who had some previous
knowledge of my family (originally due to
black-dose and blue-pill, I believe), invited
me and my sister to partake of his Christmas
cheer at the Pharmacie Anglaise. We both
obtained the requisite permission. At five
o'clock that dark December afternoon we
found ourselves, attired in gala-costume, in
the friendly Batten's salon, happy, hungry,
and full of home-thoughts.

There was Batten in a white waistcoat,
looking — with his fair glossy hair plastered
over his meek little forehead — to my irreverent
mind far more like a waiter than a
doctor, yet with sufficient odour of lozenges
and ipecacuanha pervading him to vindicate
his Apothecaries' Hall's pretensions. There
was Mrs. Batten in a pink dress, and with
pink eyelids too. The pudding had, perhaps,
proved too much for her sensibilities. There
was Cousin Louisa, a relative and retainer of
the house of Batten. She was hideous, but
friendly, and was quite a Child's Own Book
of stories and games. There was Captain
Chiff, late of the Royal Waggon Train, who
had lived in Paris ever since the peace of
eighteen hundred and fifteen, and was
reported to repose himself, every autumn, in
the debtors' prison of Clichy (at the suit of
some creditor who was compelled by law to
pay a franc a-day for his support there), just
as one might retire to a villa in the country.
There were two Misses Chiff, angular,
musical, and frost-bitten, nasally-speaking. And
finally there was great store of children — the
young Battens, ourselves, and some youthful
pilgrims at various Parisian boarding-schools,
similarly circumstanced, who had been bid to
eat the fatted pudding by the friendly Batten.

We, children, were very happy and noisy,
and talked and laughed much, comparing our
school experiences among ourselves. The
elder guests were decorously cheerful; but I
could observe (I was a bit of an observer
even then) that a gloom hung over our hosts.
Mrs. Batten's eyelids, I repeat, showed
symptoms of recent lachrymatory irritation.
Batten was perturbed in spirit. He looked
frequently towards the door; he asked me much
too frequently if I was ready for my dinner;
and he changed colour, and looked positively
wretched when the door opened, and Irish
Mary, so was the tyrannical servant-of-all-work
called, came to lay the cloth for dinner.
I noticed (inquisitive urchin) a certain wildness
in that domestic's eye, an unsteadiness
of gait, a mingled imbecility and ferocity of
expression. You know how precociously
shrewd children are—how they are gifted
with a sort of second-sight — how the little
scholars in Shenstone's charming poem eye the
birch-tree, and shape it into rods, and tingle
at the view. Well, I noticed all these
things about Irish Mary; and another of my
senses became awakened to a certain odour,
half saccharine, half alcoholic, and I shaped
it into rum, and trembled for the pudding.

Mrs. Batten had already dropped a tearful
hint about a French female cook, who had
been engaged the day before to prepare the
dinner, Irish Mary having given symptoms
of a recurrence of a disorder known as
tantrums; which tantrums were evil spirits that
lasted ordinarily about a week, and required
to be laid in a red sea of rum. But the
French cuisinière had broken down in an
early stage of the proceedings. She had
fainted: her syncope beiug attributed partly
to the confined atmosphere of the kitchen;
(which, as in many French houses, was on the
floor above our heads), partly the mortification
of having been worsted in verbal single
combat by Mary, whose broad Connaught
quite diminished her French; partly through
tight lacing. The vast majority of French
female cooks have waists like wasps, and
wear lavender boots. At length, after we
had waited what seemed to me an
inconceivable time, dinner was at length
announced. We, youngsters, were bestowed at
a side-table. My dignity was a little hurt
by this, as also by the insulting but
well-meant offer of Cousin Louisa to cut up my
meat for me; but I was consoled by thinking
of pudding. We had some very nice soup
first, some turkey roasted and stuffed with
chestnuts. The roast-beef was to follow, and
then — then — the pudding.

It was to have followed, but it didn't. We
waited a long time — a very long time. Our