sumptuously every day. I was presented
to her, but I was of the merest rabble. I
was English, and the English are all
traders; so she took not the slightest notice
of me. When Madame de l'Isle returned
the call, I happened to be with her, perhaps
because there was a long distance to go,
which made a fiacre necessary, and the
English are all so rich. We went to the end
of the Boulevards, and there alighted. Then
we got into some very dirty streets, and
found ourselves among the rag-merchants.
Such misery, filth, wretchedness and rags, I
never imagined. There lived, in a miserable
house, Madame la Comtesse, and her
husband, and her sons, in three or four small
rooms. Of course I did not enter; I had
had enough of the manners of Louis
Seize's court; so I looked at the rags
without, while our friends viewed the rags
within. How the sons passed their time
I cannot imagine. To earn their living
even in army or navy, they would have
thought intolerable degradation; they preferred
death by starvation to such dishonour;
so they lived in idleness and misery, and
Madame la Comtesse worked for them,—
cleaning the rooms, and cooking what little
they had to eat.

These strange people used to form one of
the sights of my holidays at Madame
Grondet's; happily I saw many more
cheerful things. Not the least of these
was our superintendent; little Mademoiselle
Beaupart,—trotting briskly about
with her father, released from all her half-yearly
care and trouble, and evidently in an
ecstatic state of mind. She was to be met
with, looking into shop windows on the
Boulevards; sitting under orange-trees in the
Tuileries gardens; staring at the fountains
at Versailles; riding on donkeys at St.-Germain,
and, in short, doing all sorts of idle
and dissipated things. Another grand sight
was Monsieur Petitpieds, driving his little one-horse
open carriage in the Bois de Boulogne,
and being pulled up short every now and
then by his wife, who severely reproached him
for going up wrong roads. He was as meek
as a lamb on such occasions, and turned the
horse's head immediately without a murmur.
In our evening walk home, up the Rue de la
Paix, we always met the pretty daughter of
the good old people, who kept the linendraper's
shop under the name of la grande mère,
taking a turn or two with—her brother?—
before the lamps were lit; and we had to
thread our way through a crowd of smokers.
A puff of tobacco brings Paris and its people
and those old times to my mind, with a
feeling half pleasure half pain; just as
keenly as a street organ, wandering through
our English village, sets me dreaming of
St.-Germain.

Rornantic St.-Germain! Lovely summer
evenings have found me on your terrace,
watching the gradual darkening of the
landscape at my feet, and listening dreamily to
the music of innumerable organs and bands
in the dancing-booths; where our cook, Fifine,
was figuring away in brown boots and white
muslin. Polkas floated in the air, and died
off in the silent open country below. And
then stately Versailles, with its fountains,
and statues, and orange trees, and avenues
and terraces, and its velvety lawns, that
one never could walk on without stepping
out proudly, drawing one's self up as tail
as possible, and hoping that one's dress
trailed well behind, and fancying one's self a
great lady of Louis the Fourteenth's court.

But, after all, St.-Cloud is the place for
holidays. There is the pretty park, covered
in some places with wild violets. There is
Claire Lagrange's château; a gray, old,
crumbling house, almost without furniture.
What a view there was from the upper
windows! We did not think it real Those
cardboard looking vehicles—could they be
real omnibuses? Could those small, busy
black insects be men and women? We knew
when the trains that steamed through the
valley were too late or too soon, and we
talked scandal about them just as we did
about other neighbours.

How quickly those six holiday weeks sped
away! We seemed to have but just left the
great green gates at Plantin, when they closed
upon us again. When we heard Mademoiselle
Pauline, and saw her keys; and when
the class-mistress called out, " Silence,
Mesdemoiselles!" we knew that we had enjoyed six
weeks' liberty, and had now verily returned
to our old chains. Only chains for the body;
our imaginations were not bound by anything;
they might have been the better for a
little chaining up during the first few weeks
of renewed school. Marie Campeau, Blanche
de l'Isle, and the rest of them, flew far away
on the wings of fancy every evening, when
they related to their friends all that they had
said, and done, and seen, and thought, and
suffered, and enjoyed, since we all parted.
Marvellous indeed those adventures were!
The girls must have read a good many
feuilletons in six weeks. One thing only
they did not exaggerate, and that was, the
delight they had compressed into the time.
It does me good to think of it, even now.

New Tale by the Author of MARY BARTON, publishing
weekly in HOUSEHOLD WORDS.

ON WEDNESDAY, October the Twenty-fifth, will be
published, in HOUSEHOLD WORDS, the NINTH PORTION of a
New Work of Fiction, called

NORTH AND SOUTH.

By the AUTHOR OF MARY BARTON.

The publication of this Story will he continued in HOUSEHOLD
WORDS from Week to Week, and completed in Five Months from
its commencement on September the Second.

Price of each Weekly Number ol HOUSEHOLD WORDS
(containing, besides, the usual variety of matter), Twopence; or Stamped,
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