fresh
coverings on old furniture, planting flowers and vegetables in the
garden--in fact, pouring out her Dutch housekeeping soul in a thousand
and one ways. The French servants, amazed at these activities,
thought she was very queer. Once when she was on a step-ladder, with a
hammer in her hand, putting up some pictures, she heard some one
whisper outside: "_Elle est folle._" As the two servants came in she
cried out indignantly, waving the hammer for emphasis, "Pas folle!
Beaucoup d'intelligence!" and then, losing her balance, fell over,
step-ladder and all, while the servants fled shrieking. To her
mother-in-law she writes: "For Louis's birthday I found a violet
blooming at the back of the house, and yesterday I discovered in our
reserve a large magnolia tree, the delight of my heart. I am
continually finding something new."

Two things were to her as a closed book: one was foreign languages and
the other was music. She could not sing a note nor hardly tell one
tune from another, yet she liked to listen to music. Her speaking
voice was low, modulated, and sweet, but with few inflections, and her
husband once compared it to the pleasantly monotonous flow of a
running brook under ice. As to languages, although she never seemed
able to acquire any extended knowledge of the tongue of any foreign
land in which she dwelt, she always managed in some mysterious way of
her own to communicate freely with the inhabitants. In Spanish she
only learned _si_, yet, supplemented with much gay laughter and many
expressive gesticulations, that one word went a long way. She writes
amusingly of this difficulty from Marseilles:

"Yesterday the servant and I went out shopping, which was difficult
for me, but, although she knows no English, she seems to understand,
as did the shopkeepers, my strange lingo. I had to put on the manner
of an old experienced shopper and housekeeper, and count my change
with great care, for it was important that I should impress both the
woman and the shop people with the notion that I knew what was what. I
have been in town all day, making arrangements with butchers, buying
an American stove--for the enormous gaudy French range is of no
account whatever--and even went and got my luncheon in a restaurant,
and all upon my pidgin French. To Louis's great amusement I sometimes
address him in it. I bought some cups and saucers to-day of a man who
said 'yes' to all I said, while to all his remarks I answered '_oui