nd prove his case."

By this time we have agreed that the weekly bill as a whole is
substantially correct, and all that Salemina has to do is to estimate
our several shares in it; so Francesca and I say good night and leave
her toiling like Cicero in his retirement at Tusculum. By midnight she
has generally brought the account to a point where a half-hour's fresh
attention in the early morning will finish it. Not that she makes it
come out right to a penny. She has been treasurer of the Boston Band of
Benevolence, of the Saturday Morning Sloyd Circle, of the Club for the
Reception of Russian Refugees, and of the Society for the Brooding of
Buddhism; but none of these organisations carries on its existence by
means of pounds, shillings, and pence, or Salemina's resignation
would have been requested long ago. However, we are not disposed to be
captious; we are too glad to get rid of the bill. If our united thirds
make four or five shillings in excess, we divide them equally; if it
comes the other way about, we make it up in the same manner; always
meeting the sneers of masculine critics with Dr. Holmes's remark that a
faculty for numbers is a sort of detached-lever arrangement that can be
put into a mighty poor watch.

Chapter II. The powdered footman smiles.

Salemina is so English! I can't think how she manages. She had not been
an hour on British soil before she asked a servant to fetch in some
coals and mend the fire; she followed this Anglicism by a request for
a grilled chop, 'a grilled, chump chop, waiter, please,' and so on from
triumph to triumph. She now discourses of methylated spirits as if she
had never in her life heard of alcohol, and all the English equivalents
for Americanisms are ready for use on the tip of her tongue. She says
'conserv't'ry' and 'observ't'ry'; she calls the chambermaid 'Mairy,'
which is infinitely softer, to be sure, than the American 'Mary,'
with its over-long a; she ejaculates 'Quite so!' in all the pauses of
conversation, and talks of smoke-rooms, and camisoles, and luggage-vans,
and slip-bodies, and trams, and mangling, and goffering. She also eats
jam for breakfast as if she had been reared on it, when every one knows
that the average American has to contract the jam habit by patient and
continuous practice.

This instantaneous assimilation of English customs does not seem to be
affectation on Salemina's part; nor will I wrong her by fancying that
she went through a cou