The Englishman is modelled on his father; the Frenchman is modelled rather on his mother. * * * * * If I had to name the most eminently English quality, without hesitation I would name--hospitality. And as it is difficult, when making observations on a foreign country, not to be led into comparisons, I will add, at the risk of being taxed with want of patriotism by those good French jingos who believe the English to be semi-barbarians living in a kind of eternal darkness--I will add, I say, that English hospitality is much more thoughtful and generous than French hospitality. The Frenchwoman is a human ant; she is no lender: she only half opens her door. The Englishwoman is like the grasshopper: she flings wide the doors of her hospitality. Go and pay a call in a French provincial house ... if you should faint, your hostess will offer you a glass of _eau sucrée_; if she invites you to a dance, she will offer you a cake and a cup of chocolate. To be allowed a seat at her table, you must be one of her own: her hospitality does not extend beyond the family circle. She calls regularly on her friends, who religiously return her visits; but they are dry, state calls; and arrived home, each one shuts herself in, and double locks her door. No one, who has lived long in the French provinces, can wonder at the home life being a closed letter for foreigners. The absurdities, retailed about us in books which pretend to describe our manners, prove it abundantly. English provincial life is much more intellectual and gay; people are more sociable, and intercourse is freer. The young people of the well-to-do classes belong to lawn-tennis and other athletic clubs, and are constantly meeting together for recreation in the environs of the town. These daily meetings are the occasion of frequent pleasure parties and picnics. People dine, take tea or supper, at each others' houses. The inhabitants of a little English town always seemed to me like but one family. And the impromptu dances, the musical evenings, the pleasant meetings of all kinds! Not a week passes without some pretext arising for a sociable gathering. I know many a little town in which, all through the winter, the inhabitants meet together in the church schoolroom every Saturday. Some sing, others make music, good readers read extracts of some amusing book. The price of admission is one penny: the sum thus gathered pays for lighting and warming the room; if there is any surplus, it is given to the poor. These penny-readings are always well patronised. This is a critical study which takes very much the form of a panegyric, will perhaps exclaim some of my compatriots, on reading these lines which have but one ambition, that of being faithful.