re has
provided with an infinitesimal quantity of conscience. But there are now
crowds of English men and women who know their Paris well; men who never
dine in the restaurant of the stranger, and women who are equal to a
controversy with a French cook. These sons and daughters of Albion who
have transplanted themselves to French soil, can show good and true
reasons why they prefer the French to the English life. The wearying
comparative estimates of household expenses in Westbournia, and
household expenses in the Faubourg St. Honore! One of the disadvantages
of living in Paris is the constant contact with the odious atmosphere of
comparisons.

"Pray, sir--you have been in London lately--what did you pay for veal
cutlet?"

[Illustration: CROSSING THE CHANNEL--RATHER SQUALLY.]

The new arrivals are the keenest torments. "In London, where I have kept
house for over twenty years, and have had to endure every conceivable
development of servants' extortion, no cook ever demanded a supply of
white aprons yet." You explain for the hundredth time that it is the
custom in Paris. There are people who believe Kensington is the domestic
model of the civilized world, and travel only to prove at every stage
how far the rest of the universe is behind that favoured spot. He who
desires to see how narrow his countrymen and countrywomen can be abroad,
and how completely the mass of British travellers lay themselves open to
the charge of insularity, and an overweening estimate of themselves and
their native customs, should spend a few weeks in a Paris
boarding-house, somewhere in the Faubourg St. Honore--if he would have
the full aroma of British conceit. The most surprising feature of the
English quarter of the French capital is the eccentricity of the English
visitors, as it strikes their own countrymen. I cannot find it in me to
blame Gallican caricaturists. The statuettes which enliven the bronze
shops; the gaunt figures which are in the chocolate establishments; the
prints in the windows under the Rivoli colonnade; the monsters with
fangs, red hair, and Glengarry caps, of Cham, and Dore, and Bertall, and
the female sticks with ringlets who pass in the terra-cotta show of the
Palais Royal for our countrywomen, have long ago ceased to warm my
indignation. All I can say now is, that the artists and modellers have
not travelled. They have studied the strange British apparitions which
disfigure the Boulevard des Italiens in the autumn,