rnished
apartment is taken. They send home for bits of furniture and family
belongings, and gradually drop into the great army of the expatriated.

Oh, the pathos of it! One who has not seen these poor stranded waifs in
their self-imposed exile, with eyes turned towards their native land,
cannot realize all the sadness and loneliness they endure, rarely
adopting the country of their residence but becoming more firmly American
as the years go by. The home papers and periodicals are taken, the
American church attended, if there happens to be one; the English chapel,
if there is not. Never a French church! In their hearts they think it
almost irreverent to read the service in French. The acquaintance of a
few fellow-exiles is made and that of a half-dozen English families,
mothers and daughters and a younger son or two, whom the ferocious
primogeniture custom has cast out of the homes of their childhood to
economize on the Continent.

I have in my mind a little settlement of this kind at Versailles, which
was a type. The formal old city, fallen from its grandeur, was a
singularly appropriate setting to the little comedy. There the modest
purses of the exiles found rents within their reach, the quarters vast
and airy. The galleries and the park afforded a diversion, and then
Paris, dear Paris, the American Mecca, was within reach. At the time I
knew it, the colony was fairly prosperous, many of its members living in
the two or three principal _pensions_, the others in apartments of their
own. They gave feeble little entertainments among themselves,
card-parties and teas, and dined about with each other at their
respective _tables d'hote_, even knowing a stray Frenchman or two, whom
the quest of a meal had tempted out of their native fastnesses as it does
the wolves in a hard winter. Writing and receiving letters from America
was one of the principal occupations, and an epistle descriptive of a
particular event at home went the rounds, and was eagerly read and
discussed.

The merits of the different _pensions_ also formed a subject of vital
interest. The advantages and disadvantages of these rival establishments
were, as a topic, never exhausted. _Madame une telle_ gave five o'clock
tea, included in the seven francs a day, but her rival gave one more meat
course at dinner and her coffee was certainly better, while a third
undoubtedly had a nicer set of people. No one here at home can realize
the importance