This house was charming, I thought, and here at breakfast I was introduced to the children. Berenice Mary Barfleur, the only girl and the eldest child, looked to me at first a little pale and thin--quite peaked, in fact--but afterwards I found her not to be so--merely a temperamental objection on my part to a type which afterwards seemed to me very attractive. She was a decidedly wise, high-spoken, intellectual and cynical little maid. Although only eleven years of age she conversed with the air, the manner and the words of a woman of twenty. “Oh, yes. Amáyreeka! Is that a nice place? Do you like it?” I cannot in the least way convey the touch of lofty, well-bred feeling it had--quite the air and sound of a woman of twenty-five or thirty schooled in all the niceties of polite speech. “What a child,” I thought. “She talks as though she were affected, but I can see that she is not.” Quite different she seemed from what any American child could be--less vigorous, more intellectual, more spiritual; perhaps not so forceful but probably infinitely more subtle. She looked delicate, remote, Burne-Jonesy--far removed from the more commonplace school of force we know--and I think I like our type better. I smiled at her and she seemed friendly enough, but there was none of that running forward and greeting people which is an average middle-class American habit. She was too well bred. I learned afterward, from a remark dropped at table by her concerning American children, that it was considered bad form. “American children are the kind that run around hotel foyers with big bows on their hair and speak to people,” was the substance of it. I saw at once how bad American children were. Well, then came the eldest boy, Percy Franklin Barfleur, who reminded me, at first glance, of that American caricature type--dear to the newspaper cartoonist--of Little Johnnie Bostonbeans. Here he was--“glawses,” inquiring eyes, a bulging forehead, a learned air; and all at ten years, and somewhat undersized for his age--a clever child; sincere, apparently; rather earnest; eager to know, full of the light of youthful understanding. Like his sister, his manners were quite perfect but unstudied. He smiled and replied, “Quite well, thank you,” to my amused inquiries after him. I could see he was bright and thoughtful, but the unconscious (though, to me, affected) quality of the English voice amused me here again. Then came Charles Gerard Barfleur, and James Herbert Barfleur, who impressed me in quite the same way as the others. They were nice, orderly children but English, oh, so English! It was while walking in the garden after breakfast that I encountered James Herbert Barfleur, the youngest; but, in the confusion of meeting people generally, I did not recognize him. He was outside the coach house, where are the rooms of the gardener, and where my room is. “And which little Barfleur might this be?” I asked genially, in that patronizing way we have with children.