countrymen will understand what I mean in
saying that foreigners have usually very little
difficulty in foregathering, intermingling with,
and assimilating themselves to other foreigners.
This the Englishman rarely if ever does. He is,
to the end, insular, carries something about him
that is purely, peculiarly, and—to others but his
compatriots—repulsively, English wherever he
goes, and leaves at last his coffin to be covered
with a phantom Union Jack. Do you know Jack
Moseley—they say the "ley" is an interpolation
between where an "e" is, and an "s" should be
in his name—the tall, handsome Israelite, whom
his friends call the Wandering Jew, and who has
been travelling and trading in diamonds from the
Minories to the Straits of Malacca any time
these twenty years? Well, Jack told me he
was coming the other day, from the Warhoe
diggings in California, overland to Florence in
the State of Missouri. It was somewhere in
the Rocky Mountains, I think. It was at night,
and he was huddled up in a stage-coach, asleep,
and dreaming of bears, wolves, and wild Indians.
Suddenly the coach broke down, but fortunately
close to a little tavern. Jack Moseley rubbed
his eyes and thought he was still dreaming,
when, alighting, he found himself in front of
the precise model of an English wayside inn.
There was the bench, there was the horse-trough,
in front; there were the red and white blinds to
the windows; there was the bar, with its big
cheese in full cut, its pork pies, its row of gaily-
painted kegs of cordials, and its well-polished
beer-engine. There was the little parlour, with its
neatly sanded floor, its triangular spittoons, its
rack of churchwarden pipes, and its coloured
prints of fights for the championship, racing
cracks, and Sir Tatton Sykes in top-boots, affably
conversing with his trainer, who was bald-headed,
white-cravated, and respectful, in drab gaiters.
There was a grinning ostler, there was a stout
potboy, there was a spruce waitress; there was
positively a one-eyed bulldog on the premises.
On the coffee-room blinds there flourished the
approved golden legends as to chops and steaks
that were always ready, dinners that were to be
dressed, neat wines and soda-water; but wonder
of wonders! what do you think the sign was?
Not the "George Washington," not "The
Jefferson," not the "Bold Digger," not the
"Big Nugget," not the "Lucky Placer," but
"The Osbaldistone Arms." The landlord was
an American born, but his grandfather had
been a groom in the Osbaldistone family in
England. He subscribed to Bell's Life and the
local Yorkshire papers regularly, and his little
house looked as though some magician had
suddenly caught it up from the English north
country and dropped it down in the middle of
the Rocky Mountains.

Rataplan, incited by J. B. Constant, did his
best to Anglicise the Café Restaurant Chesterfield.
A little England sprang up in the Rue
Cuit-au-Four, looking as strange there as the
English colony of Heligoland at the mouth of
the Elbe. The partners imported the double
and biting Gloucester, the luscious Cheshire,
the voluptuous cheese of Stilton. English ale
and English porter were always on draught, and
a joint, of as near an approach to English beef
as could be procured at the butcher's in the
neighbouring Rue St. Lazare, was always in cut.
Sandwiches were displayed under glass covers,
to the intense amazement of the French
customers, who, sometimes trying them, frequently
managed to drop the layer of meat on the floor,
and, when they burnt their mouths with the
fiery English mustard, howled dismally. Nor
was English gin forgotten; nor did the craft
which Rataplan had learnt in London, of making
three quarts into one gallon, forsake him now.

M. Jean Baptiste Constant moved about
the establishment of which Rataplan was the
manager and the nominal landlord, but in which
the wary ex-body servant of Mr. Francis Blunt
had taken care to secure a proprietorial interest
in his usual discreet and demure, not to say
stealthy, manner. Every knife, fork, and napkin
in the place was his; yet you would not have
thought, to look at him, that he would have
ventured to take a spoonful of salt without
permission. He rarely interfered with Rataplan's
arrangements. He allowed him undivided control
in the kitchen. He permitted him to scold his two
waiters, and to overcharge the guests as much
as ever he liked. He allowed him a fair share
in the profits, which had, in a short space of
time, grown to be considerable: but he was
nevertheless lord paramount and absolute over
the Café Restaurant Chesterfield. He liked to
sway this secret power, to have this occult veto,
to be behind the scenes, and pull the wires, and
make the puppets dance. It suited his pensive,
bilious, cat-like, contemplative nature. The
sunshine was too strong for him. He blinked,
and the pupils of his eyes contracted in the
noontide glare. He had not been accustomed to it in
youth. He could bask; but he preferred to bask
in the shade, and down in a cellar.

He liked to breakfast at the Chesterfield
sometimes, just to see how things were going
on: paying for his meal, like a man, at the
counter. The waiters did not know exactly
what to make of them. They were both Swiss,
who had been abroad, and picked up more or
less "pigeon English" in Haymarket cafés and
Leicester-square hotels. One of them, Jules,
imagined him to be a kind of pensioner or hanger-
on of the establishment, boarded from time to
time, through charity, by the patron Rataplan.
The other, Alphonse, had a somewhat shrewder
notion of his standing in the house. "I will
wager," Alphonse would say to his intimates,
"that this monsieur is le bailleur de fonds—
the capitalist—the finder of money to the Café
Restaurant Chesterfield."—" But how can he be
a capitalist," the duller-witted Jules would
expostulate. "He never scolds us. He never
calls us 'nigaud,' or 'cochon.' Is that like a
bailleur de fonds."—"Bah!" Alphonse would
retort. "Jules, thou hast an excellent heart,
but thou hast a skull of wood, filled with sauce
à la tartare in place of brains. Do kings and
queens always wear their crowns? Was the