Paris, or in any other European
capital; so that even among my earliest experiences I can remember, after
an altercation with an omnibus-driver, he applied to me the popular
remark that he was "blessed if he didn't believe that the gemman had been
takin' lessons in language hof a cab-driver, _and set up o' nights to
learn_." But the ingenious American is not one whit behind the vigorous
Londoner in "de elegant fluency of sass," as darkies term it, and it
moves my heart to think that, after thirty years, and after the
marvellous experiences of men who are masters of our English tongue which
the editor of the _Century_ must have had, he still retains remembrance
of my oratory!

At last we were marched and railroaded back to Philadelphia. I need not
say that we were welcome, or that I enjoyed baths, clean clothes, and the
blest sensation of feeling decent once more. Everything in life seemed
to be _luxurious_ as it had never been before. Luxuries are very
conventional. A copy of Praetorius, for which I paid only fifteen
shillings, was to me lately a luxury for weeks; so is a visit to a
picture gallery. For years after, I had but to think of the Emergency to
realise that I was actually in all the chief conditions of happiness.

Feeling that, although I was in superb health and strength, the seeds of
typhoid were in me, I left town as soon as possible, and went with my
wife, her sister, and two half-nieces, or nieces by marriage, and child-
nephew, Edward Robins, to Cape May, a famous bathing-place by the ocean.
One of the little girls here alluded to, a Lizzie Robins, then six years
of age, is now well known as Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and "a writer of
books," while Edward has risen in journalism in Philadelphia. There as I
walked often eighteen or twenty miles a day by the sea, when the
thermometer was from 90 to 100 degrees in the shade, I soon worked away
all apprehension of typhoid and developed muscle. One day I overheard a
man in the next bathing-house asking who I was. "I don't know," replied
the other, "but if I were he, I'd go in for being a prize-fighter."

Everybody was poor in those days, so we went to a very cheap though
respectable hotel, where we paid less than half of what we had always
given at "The Island," and where we were in company quite as happy or
comfortable as we ever had been anywhere, though the death of her brother
weighed sadly on my poor wife, and her dear good mother, whom I always