as no impenetrable veil darkens your affluence
or your indigence); your preference for such
persons, your dealing with such shops, your
daily pursuits, the direction of your country
walks, the end of your journeys, and their
expected duration, and whether they have
turned out satisfactorily or otherwise;—if all
this, and twenty times more, be known or
knowable to our four thousand souls, you will
do, you pass muster, you are a sort of
bourgeois of the place; one of the pays, a bon
garçon, and a person comme il faut. To be
thus accepted as an adopted citizen, it is far
from necessary that you be enormously rich,
highly moral, nobly virtuous, or fascinatingly
amiable—which is fortunate for some folks,
myself included; but it is obligatory that
you appear before our world with a clear
individuality which may be discussed and
gossiped about, and not with an inscrutable
intangibility which would pretend to set at
defiance our keen Paul and Pauline Prys.
I mean, which would put our Pauls Pry
into a sleepless rage, and burn them to
a cinder with insatiable thirst, till they
had found you out, and all about it. Therefore,
instead of making a secret of anything,
I communicate multifarious information
before people have had time to ask it by
question direct : where I bought this new
redingote, and had that old cloak re-dyed and
re-frogged ; how much they cost respectively
for material and fashion ; what I am going
to have for dinner to-day and to-morrow ;
where I am going next week ; for which
determinate spot on the globe—la bas, the
other side of Paris, and by the chemin de fer.
are very convenient phrases ; from whence I
have just received a letter, for which Londres
is of frequent utility ; who told me such and
such scraps of latest intelligence—for which
Monsieur Chose-chose is a constant authority.
Whenever I make up my mind to marry, I
shall ask the town's consent before the lady's.
When I change my maid (which is not often),
I give the town warning first, and then the
domestic ; and I further inquire of the town
the monthly wage to be paid to, and the
service to be rendered by, the new in-comer.
I assure you the town is not pleased at all if
I give my Clementine a franc more per annum
than the town gives to her Rosalie. For
inquisitiveness, I repeat, we may challenge a
rigid comparison with the inhabitants of every
other small town in Europe. There is none
to surpass us. We know precisely what you
are going to do, as soon as you have
entertained the slightest notion of doing it ; we
know exactly what you think, before the first
vague thought has entered your own head.

We are a capable place, too, as Browne, the
skilful landscape-gardener, would have said.
A brilliant future awaits us, one of these
days. We shall be a Cheltenham of villa
residences, perhaps, when tenants will take a
lease of them before they are built, and will
wait patiently all the while they are building.
We have some beautiful promenades, when
the mud is not too deep, and the cuckoo has
picked up all the dirt. At night, our streets
are brightly lighted, when the full moon rides
high in the cloudless firmament. We have a
Grande Rue, which would be a standing
lesson of the vanity of all earthly titles, if
we did not remember that with money,
skill, and taste, nothing is impossible. We
have a Grande Place, which will be a
pretty Little Square when the new Mairie
is built, three-fourths of the houses new-
fronted, a foot-pavement laid down before
those houses, the inclosed area re-paved, a
fountain playing in the middle, and a row of
trees planted at the edge of the trottoir, with
benches beneath them for idlers to sit on.
We have had antiquities and a history. The
possession of us has given rise to a very
much longer- protracted warfare than the
charms of Helen excited in the siege of Troy.
Generations of us have been born, reared our
offspring, and died, before our English lords
and masters would yield us up to our French
ones, or our French claimants would withdraw
their pretensions to our allegiance. For
two hundred and ten long years we had the
honour to be a bone in a savoury and attractive
carcase of contention. But our antiquities
have been long blown up into the air, and
are only to be discovered in the copies of
maps and plans whose originals are destroyed.
Our history lies buried in mediæval Latin
and sapless French, under a thick stratum of
dates, mouldiness, and countly genealogies.
We must now set to work to make antiquities
and a history for our great-great-grandchildren
to study. We have a railway,
somewhere at the bottom of the English iron
mines. Finally, we have an electric telegraph,
with which one of our noblesse (an estimable
savant and a worthy man; for we have
savans and worthy men and women)
communicates from his laboratory to his living
apartments, by a cable which crosses the immense
aërial expanse of his front flower-garden,
runs for the distance of several mètres along
the top of a pear-tree wall, and darts
suddenly into the dark recesses of the kitchen,
to emerge on a dial-plate at the side of the
dresser. Our wizard thus transmits to his
retainers mysterious orders, such as, " Bring
hot water," " Harness the horse." They, in
turn, can cause a little bell to ring, which says,
"Ting, ting, ting! Some visitors have called"
But, in bell-ringing, the seigneur has more
than his revenge. He has the means of
waking up his domestic by an electric alarum,
which never ceases its crazing din (unless the
battery is exhausted) till the poor fellow
jumps out of his warm bed and unhooks the
wire of communication.

Change suits us not; the innovations of
the day don't agree with our constitution.
Our bookseller, with a pious respect for age,
adorns his windows with last year's almanacs,
and is rich in editions that have bidden, adieu