somewhat remarkable.
The lingual advance of one of them was quite startling. Our young ladies
had striven to teach him "good-by." One day, therefore, as the ladies
were departing from the dining-room, leaving the gentlemen to their
wine, our Parsee opened the door with grave, Oriental courtesy, and,
bowing to the rustling covey, said solemnly, "By god, ladies, by god!"

During a political discussion in which English and Australians took
chief parts, a Melbourne girl exclaimed excitedly, "Thank goodness,
_I'm_ not English!"

"Not Engleesh!" exclaimed her neighboring Parsee. "What are you but the
small little brat of the mother-country?"

Not until we laughed did our grave Oriental remember that "brat" and
"child" are not strictly synonymous.

Said one of our English girls afterward to me, with tact and taste
pre-eminently British, "_She_ glad she is not English! Really, _I'd_
almost as soon be American as Australian."

Our Parsees were not our only peculiar people. We Americans found quite
as much food for sly laughter in the queerness of our English _habitues_
as they did in ours. Our English contingent was largely feminine,
therefore, as goes without saying, very High-Church, very _devote_, and
excessively Tory, worshipping the English aristocracy vastly more than
that of celestial courts. Everybody knows the two diseases that
virulently assail young Englishwomen,--"scarlet fever" and "black
vomit,"--maladies provoked by association with red-coated officers and
black-coated curates.

One of our fair Britons had the darker malady. She fasted regularly on
Fridays and Tuesdays. We always recognized her _jours maigres_ by the
quantity of cakes and pastry we saw carried to her room just before
dinner, to which dinner she came in nun-like gray silk, saintly
coiffure, with ascetic pallor on cheeks wont to bloom with roses de
Ninon, to dine, _a la_ Sainte Catherine or Sainte Something else, on a
few lentils or a lettuce-leaf.

One Sunday somebody asked this fair devotee to give us a certain popular
but profane piano-arrangement. She was shocked beyond measure. A few
moments' temptation, however, brought her to a compromise.

"I think there will be no harm if I play it slowly and make it as solemn
as possible."

We smiled at the aesthetic piety of our Saint Catherine. But she did more
than smile at our national practicality when, one evening, from the gay
drawing-room we heard the clamor of a feminine arrival below: