Another foreign neighbour, described by Miss Mitford, was an old French _émigré_ who came to reside in “the small town of Hazelby”; a pretty little place where everything seemed at a standstill.... “It has not even a cheap shop,” she remarks, “for female gear.... The very literature of Hazelby is doled out at the pastry-cook’s, in a little one-windowed shop, kept by Matthew Wise. Tarts occupy one end of the counter and reviews the other; whilst the shelves are parcelled out between books, and dolls, and ginger-bread. It is a question by which of his trades poor Matthew gains least.” Here it was that the old _émigré_ lodged “in a low three-cornered room, over the little shop, which Matthew Wise designated his ‘first floor.’” Little was known of him, but that he was a thin, pale, foreign-looking gentleman, who shrugged his shoulders in speaking, took a great deal of snuff, and made a remarkably low bow. But it soon appeared from a written paper placed in a conspicuous part of Matthew’s shop, that he was an Abbé, and that he would do himself the honour of teaching French to any of the nobility and gentry of Hazelby who might think fit to employ him. Pupils dropped in rather slowly. The curate’s daughters, and the attorney’s son, and Miss Deane the milliner—but she found the language difficult, and left off, asserting that M. l’Abbé’s snuff made her nervous. At last poor M. l’Abbé fell ill, really ill, dangerously ill, and Matthew Wise went in all haste to summon Mr. Hallett (the apothecary).... “Now Mr. Hallett was what is usually called a rough diamond. He piqued himself on being a plain downright Englishman [and] he had such an aversion to a Frenchman, in general, as a cat has to a dog: and was wont to erect himself into an attitude of defiance and wrath at the mere sight of the object of his antipathy. He hated and despised the whole nation, abhorred the language, and “would as lief,” he assured Matthew, “have been called in to a toad.” He went, however, grew interested in the case, which was difficult and complicated; exerted all his skill, and in about a month accomplished a cure.” By this time he had also become interested in his patient, whose piety, meekness, and resignation had won upon him in an extraordinary degree. The disease was gone, but a languor and lowness remained, which Mr. Hallett soon traced to a less curable disorder, poverty. The thought of the debt to himself evidently weighed on the poor Abbé’s spirits, and our good apothecary at last determined to learn French purely to liquidate his own long bill.