busy with their heavy kettle, and with their
tea-making, put in a joyous word now and
then.  At dinner the host talked of nothing
more intelligible than French mathematics;
the heir drawled out an infinite deal of
nothing about the "Shakspeare and musical
glasses" of the day; the traveller gave us
latitudes and longitudes, and rates of population,
exports and imports, with the greatest
precision; and the girls were as pretty, helpless,
inane fine ladies as you would wish
to see.

Speaking of wood fires, reminds me of
Madame de Sablé's fires. Of course they
were of wood, being in Paris; but I believe
that even if she had lived in a coal country
she would have burned wood by instinctive
preference, as a lady I once knew always
ordered a lump of cannel coal to be brought
up if ever her friends seemed silent and dull.
A wood-fire has a kind of spiritual, dancing,
glancing life about it. It is an elvish
companion, crackling, hissing, bubbling: throwing
out beautiful jets of vivid many-coloured
flame. The best wood-fires I know are
those at Keswick. Making lead-pencils is
the business of the place; and the cedar
chips for scent, and the thinnings of the
larch and fir plantations thereabouts for warm
and brilliant light, make such a fire as Madame
de Sablé would have delighted in.

Depend upon it too, every seat in her salon
was easy and comfortable of its kind. They
might not be made of any rare kind of wood,
nor covered very magnificently, but the bodies
of her friends could rest and repose in them
in easy unconstrained attitudes. No one can
be agreeable, perched on a chair which does
not afford space for proper support. I defy
the most accomplished professional wit to go
on uttering "mots" in a chair with a stiff
hard upright back, or with his legs miserably
dangling. No! Madame de Sablé's seats
were commodious, and probably varied to suit
all tastes; nor was there anything in the
shape of a large and cumbrous article of
furniture placed right in the middle of her room,
so as to prevent her visitors from changing
their places, or drawing near to each other, or
to the fire, if they so willed it. I imagine
likewise that she had that placid, kindly
manner which would never show any loss of
self-possession. I fancy that there was a
welcome ready for all, even though some
came a little earlier than they were expected.

I was once very much struck by the
perfect breeding of an old Welsh herb-
woman, with whom I drank tea,—a tea
which was not tea after all,—an infusion
of balm and black currant leaves, with a
pinch of lime blossom to give it a Pekoe
flavour. She had boasted of the delicacy of
this beverage to me on the previous day, and
I had begged to be allowed to come and drink
a cup with her. The only drawback was that
she had but one cup, but she immediately
bethought her that she had two saucers, one
of which would do just as well, indeed better
than any cup. I was anxious to be in time,
and so I was too early. She had not done
dusting and rubbing when I arrived, but she
made no fuss; she was glad to see me, and
quietly bade me welcome, though I had come
before all was as she could have wished. She
gave me a dusted chair, sate down herself
with her kilted petticoats and working apron,
and talked to me as if she had not a care or
a thought on her mind but the enjoyment of
the present time. By and by, in moving
about the room, she slipped behind the bed-
curtain, still conversing. I heard the splash
of water, and a drawer open and shut; and
then my hostess emerged spruce, and clean,
and graced, but not one whit more agreeable
or at her ease than she had been for the
previous half-hour in her working dress.

There are a set of people who put on
their agreeableness with their gowns. Here,
again, I have studied the subject, and the
result is that I find people of this description
are more pleasant in society in their second-
best than in their very best dresses. These
last are new; and the persons I am speaking
of never feel thoroughly at home in them,
never lose their consciousness of unusual
finery until the first stain has been made.
With their best gowns they put on an
unusual fineness of language; they say
"commence" instead of "begin;" they enquire if
they may "assist" instead of asking if they
may "help" you to anything. And yet there
are some, very far from vain or self-conscious,
who are never so agreeable as when they
have a dim half-defined idea that they are
looking their best—not in finery, but in air,
arrangement, or complexion. I have a notion
that Madame de Sablé, with her fine instincts,
was aware of this, and that there were one or
two secrets about the furniture and disposition
of light in her salon which are lost in these
degenerate days. I heard, or read, lately,
that we make a great mistake in furnishing
our reception-rooms with all the light and
delicate colours, the profusion of ornament,
and flecked and spotted chintzes, if we wish
to show off the human face and figure; that
our ancestors and the great painters knew
better, with their somewhat sombre and
heavy-tinted back-grounds, relieving or
throwing out into full relief the rounded
figure and the delicate peach-like complexion.
I fancy Madame de Sablé's salon was
furnished with deep warm soberness of tone;
lightened up by flowers, and happy animated
people, in a brilliancy of dress, which would
be lost now-a-days against our satin walls,
and flower-bestrewn carpets, and gilding,
gilding everywhere. Then, somehow,
conversation must have flown naturally into
sense or nonsense, as the case might be.
People must have gone to her house well
prepared for either lot. It might be that
wit would come uppermost, sparkling, crackling,
leaping, calling out echoes all around;