I thought of her, as I have thought of many another Christian philanthropist, Catholic and Protestant, how much more in keeping with the doctrine of Christ it would be to stay unpretentiously at home and practise the modest virtue of honesty, doing unto others as one would be done unto. On her way to her catechism class she would drop in to the woodman’s to order wood for me, as a favour for which it was my duty to thank her, pay the woodman three francs, and virtuously charge me five in the bill. I was ill, and in the same spirit of benevolence she ordered everything needful for me—_for a consideration_. For all that, she was the nicest, the cheerfulest, and most pleasing robber and humbug I have ever known. I defy any Anglo-Saxon to give the fleeced as much value in the way of agreeable speech and cordiality and beaming smiles as this religious Norman lady gave me. She broke the heart of a trusting friend, and, having gracefully beggared her, drove her to America ruined and embittered, yet went on her own confident way along the path of virtue, assured of nothing more than her indisputable right to a seat in Paradise. [Illustration: A SEASIDE SERVICE _Edelfelt_] But she was not the first to initiate me into the economical mysteries of the French home. Before this I had been the “paying guest” of a native of Burgundy with an Alsatian title as long as an Alexandrian verse. She professed to have known Lamartine in her youth, and when I spoke of the poet by his name, she corrected me with a grand and reproving air: “Mademoiselle, we of Macon say _Monsieur de Lamartine_.” Here the same mysteries of locked _salon_ all the week round, open only for a few hours on the famous reception day of Madame la Baronne; the same absence of plenty at the board—lunch for three persons invariably three boiled eggs, three tiny cutlets and three boiled potatoes, three little rolls and three small apples. Never a fourth of anything, should one of the three happen to be a little hungrier than the other two. Only, as I had to do with a broken-down aristocrat, there reigned, instead of the beaming cordiality of the bourgeoise, an awful, desperate, glacial reserve. The baroness’ attitude to life may be described fitly as resembling her attitude to the late lamented poet, whom she apostrophised stiffly as _Monsieur de Lamartine_. She was frightfully dignified, even in starving her unfortunate paying guest on twelve pounds a month. It is true, paying guests are not infrequently regarded by ladies as creatures predestined to starvation and prompt payment in their hands, and in business matters I can safely say, from singularly sharp experience, that there are no more heartless and rapacious landladies on the face of the earth than needy and educated women. The greed of the common woman runs to pence, while that of the lady runs to shillings; and whereas the former, when she is dishonest, has a lingering consciousness of it, and flies into