Such was the little party at the ‘France’ when I took up my residence there in the month of May, and gradually one dropped off after another as the summer wore on. The Germans went back to sauer kraut and kreutzer whist; the secretary of legation was on leave; the wine-merchant was off to St. Petersburg; the pianist was in the bureau he once directed--and so on, leaving our party reduced to the count and madame, a stray traveller, a deaf abbé, and myself. The dog-days in a Continental city are, every one knows, stupid and tiresome enough. Every one has taken his departure either to his château, if he has one, or to the watering-places; the theatre has no attraction, even if the heat permitted one to visit it; the streets are empty, parched, and grass-grown; and except the arrival and departure of that incessant locomotive, John Bull, there is no bustle or stir anywhere. Hapless, indeed, is the condition then of the man who is condemned from any accident to toil through this dreary season; to wander about in solitude the places he has seen filled by pleasant company; to behold the park and promenades given up to Flemish _bonnes_ or Norman nurses, where he was wont to glad his eye with the sight of bright eyes and trim shapes, flitting past in all the tasty elegance of Parisian toilette; to see the lazy _frotteur_ sleeping away his hours at the _porte cochere_, which a month before thundered with the deep roll of equipage coming and going. All this is very sad, and disposes one to be dull and discontented too.