description of the mixed
company in the boarding-house on the Lago Maggiore.

There was the parish embowered, or rather choked, in trees, the
orderly mechanical routine, the perfect self-satisfaction of all
parties, and their imperviousness to progress,--the two squires, one
a fox-hunter, the other a general reposing on his laurels,--the
school where everything was subordinated to learning to behave
oneself lowly and reverently to all one's betters, and to do one's
duty in that state of life to which it _HAS_ pleased Heaven to call
one,--the horror at her tricycle, the impossibility of improvement,
the predilection for farmyard odours, the adherence to tumbledown
dwellings, the contempt of drinking fountains,--all had their meed
of exaggeration not without drollery.

The two ancient spinsters, daughters to the general, with their
pudding-baskets, buttonholes, and catechisms, had their full share--
dragooning the parish into discipline,--the younger having so far
marched with the century as to have indited a few little tracts of
the Goody Two-Shoes order, and therefore being mentioned by her
friends with bated breath as something formidable, 'who writes,'
although, when brought to the test, her cultivation was of the
vaguest, most discursive order. Finally, there was a sketch of the
heavy dinner party which had welcomed the strangers, and of the
ponderous county magnates and their wives who had been invited, and
the awe that their broad and expansive ladies expected to impress,
and how one set talked of their babies, and the other of G.F.S.
girls, and the gentlemen seemed to be chiefly occupied in abusing
their M.P. and his politics. Altogether, it was given as a lesson
to Americans of the still feudal and stationary state of country
districts in poor old England.

'What do you think of this, Bessie?' exclaimed Admiral Merrifield.
'We seem to have got a young firebrand in the midst of us.'

'Oh, papa! have you got that thing? What a pity!'

'You don't mean that you have seen it before?'

'Yes; one of my acquaintances in London sent it to me.'

'And you kept it to yourself?'

'I thought it would only vex you and mamma. Who sent it to you?'

'Anne did, with all the passages marked. What a horrid little
treacherous baggage!'

'I daresay we are very tempting. For once we see ourselves as
others see us! And you see 'tis American.'

'All the worse, holding us, who have done our best to welcome her
hospita