turned with a big, gruff laugh as he waved his hand to her. “There’s Mlle. Jeanne, happy at last. She is able to calumniate us all in good English to an insolent foreigner. _Pauvres de nous!_” and wherever we went together those three days, I saw that the townspeople in shops, down by the river the boatmen and boys, the women who showed us over the museum and over the town-hall, the Alsatian manager of Laroche Joubert’s huge paper factory, whither Jeanne and I drove next day, the servants at the Duc de la Rochefoucauld’s castle, all knew, admired, and respected Jeanne, the artisan’s daughter and Warwickshire nurse. She was not pretty nor distinguished, she dressed like a dowdy nurse, and wore cotton mittens, but I would I knew anybody in her position who could attain such popularity in a town like Angoulême out of France. And all with the utterest simplicity, and an excellent breeding. A heart-broken shoemaker, a melancholy widower, who wanted her for wife, came to me and begged me to use my influence in his behalf. He confided to me the tale of his love, and felt sure that if Jeanne were urged to marry him in the language of Shakespeare she would consent. She brought in to be introduced to me a soldier to whom she was teaching English, a nice, mild young fellow, who told me with gravity that in order to keep himself abreast of English literature he had subscribed to _Pick Me Up_ for himself and Jeanne, getting this luminous organ from Bordeaux. The doctor and his wife invited Jeanne to take her foreign lion over one evening, and we were made much of, and given syrup and water to drink. We stayed out shockingly late of nights, for there was a splendid moon and I could not be torn from the river. But when we entered on our upward toil along the dark and silent streets, Jeanne would say: “Talk English very loud. It is a woman’s best safeguard in France.” She called the English tongue “a _coup de pistolet_ in French ears.” So whenever she saw a silhouette in uniform, she fired off an aggressive shot of British vocables, and when midnight, or later, found us under the watchmaker’s roof the old man lifted his hands in horrified astonishment at our staying abroad so late. It was another evidence of English eccentricity.