sideboard, and in three minutes after, two waiters appeared, bringing in various articles of food, while a somewhat stately personage at their head, dressed in black coat and black silk stockings, carried a silver covered dish, which he placed at the top of the table. I had chosen plainly enough, and the cookery was plain also; but the very look of the viands, their tenderness, their excellence, might have provoked gluttony in an anchorite. Even good Father Bonneville recovered his appetite, and a glass of wine, though savoring too much of brandy, for either his palate or my own, aided in raising his spirits which had been somewhat depressed before. Leaning his head gently on one side after the cloth was cleared away and the waiters had disappeared, with fine, clear, tall lights upon the table, the curtains closely drawn, and the fire crackling and sparkling, and making strange faces for us in the grate, he began to talk to me about England, in a sort of dreamy memory-like manner, which made me for a moment fear that the good old man’s brain had suffered from grief, and sickness, and time, and that he was slightly wandering. “It will be fifty years, Louis,” he said, “on the twentieth of this month, since I was last in this land of England. It was a very different land then—or I have much forgotten it. True, I saw not much of the country; for my life was in the capital—a great gloomy city, as it seemed to me, with grand and splendid things going on in it, but which—being excluded from most of them by profession—seemed like pictures in what they call a phantasmagoria, where suddenly out of grim darkness, richly robed figures rush upon you, and are lost again in a moment.” “I never knew you had been in England, my dear friend,” I replied. “You never told me so, I think.” “No,” he said thoughtfully, “no. But I was in London for nearly eighteen months: the chaplain to the Embassy. Your father was a boy then, Louis, and I taught him as I have taught you.”