celebrity.

Salemina insisted on my taking the box seat, in the hope that the
Honourable Arthur would amuse me. She little knew him! He sapped me
of all my ideas, and gave me none in exchange. Anything so unspeakably
heavy I never encountered. It is very difficult for a woman who doesn't
know a nigh horse from an off one, nor the wheelers from the headers (or
is it the fronters?), to find subjects of conversation with a gentleman
who spends three-fourths of his existence on a coach. It was the more
difficult for me because I could not decide whether Willie Beresford was
cross because I was devoting myself to the whip, or because Francesca
had remained at home with a headache. This state of affairs continued
for about fifteen miles, when it suddenly dawned upon the Honourable
Arthur that, however mistaken my speech and manner, I was trying to be
agreeable. This conception acted on the honest and amiable soul like
magic. I gradually became comprehensible, and finally he gave himself up
to the theory that, though eccentric, I was harmless and amusing, so we
got on famously,--so famously that Willie Beresford grew ridiculously
gloomy, and I decided that it could not be Francesca's headache.

The names of these English streets are a never-failing source of delight
to me. In that one morning we drove past Pie, Pudding, and Petticoat
Lanes, and later on we found ourselves in a 'Prudent Passage,' which
opened, very inappropriately, into 'Huggin Lane.' Willie Beresford said
it was the first time he had ever heard of anything so disagreeable as
prudence terminating in anything so agreeable as huggin'. When he had
been severely reprimanded by his mother for this shocking speech, I said
to the Honourable Arthur:--

"I don't understand your business signs in England,--this 'Company,
Limited,' and that 'Company, Limited.' That one, of course, is quite
plain" (pointing to the front of a building on the village street),
"'Goat's Milk Company, Limited'; I suppose they have but one or two
goats, and necessarily the milk must be Limited."

Salemina says that this was not in the least funny, that it was
absolutely flat; but it had quite the opposite effect upon the
Honourable Arthur. He had no command over himself or his horses for some
minutes; and at intervals during the afternoon the full felicity of
the idea would steal upon him, and the smile of reminiscence would flit
across his ruddy face.

The next day, at the Eton and Harrow