who talk of English "fruit" as a rather audacious _plaisanterie_, though I could see very well what was meant a short time since by an anecdote related to me in a tone of contemptuous generalization by a couple of my fellow-countrywomen. They had arrived in London in the dog-days, and, lunching at their hotel, had asked to be served with some fruit. The hotel was of the stateliest pattern, and they were waited upon by a functionary whose grandeur was proportionate. This gentleman bowed and retired, and after a long delay, reappearing, placed before them, with an inimitable gesture, a dish of gooseberries and currants. It appeared upon investigation that these acrid vegetables were the only "fruit" that the establishment could undertake to supply; and it seemed to increase the irony of the situation that the establishment was as near as possible to Buckingham Palace. I say that the heroines of my anecdote seemed disposed to generalize: this was sufficiently the case, I mean, to give me a pretext for assuring them that in Devonshire, in Warwickshire, in Norfolk, in Dorset and in twenty other English counties whose names they had certainly heard, the most beautiful peaches and melons might be seen growing in considerable numbers in the most admirably organized hot-houses in the depths of the most extensive and picturesque properties. My auditors tossed their heads, of course, at the counties, the peaches and melons, the admirable hot-houses and the extensive properties; and indeed at their ascetic hostelry close to Buckingham Palace these reflections were but scantily consoling. But these are the things they have had in mind, the reasonable English people whom in other countries I have heard upholding the superiority of English fruit. I have heard them argue the case most resolutely against Frenchmen and Americans, but, in reality, the contending parties were talking about two very different things. One side was talking about fruit as a luxury, and the other about fruit as a necessity. The Englishman was thinking of the soft-colored, smooth-skinned peaches that he had been invited down into Dorsetshire to eat at eight o'clock in the evening at a brilliantly-lighted table: the American and the Frenchman were thinking of these articles as they importuned you from heaped-up fruit stalls in your daily walk. The difference brings me back to what I referred to as the "private" character of this particular branch of English comfort. A stranger may spend a summer in London and never be reminded of the existence of pears and grapes. Those establishments known in America as fruit-stalls are conspicuous by their absence, and their office is in no appreciable degree supplied by the inns, the restaurants or the clubs. I believe there are peaches of great rotundity to be obtained at Covent Garden market at half a crown apiece, but Covent Garden is hardly on the line of one's daily strolls. The irritated stranger, therefore, sitting down to gooseberries at a