and service less per month than it would cost for one room at any of the grand hotels. And here they lived as nearly as possible the life of the French home. Abandoning soon the hearty American breakfast, the student learned that the brain worked well during the morning hours on its cup of coffee and its share,—a yard if you like, for bread can be bought by the yard—of bread. And away out here in Passy they found their servant, the good old woman who owned the house, yet waited upon them with her own hands, had not yet learned the trick of the hotels and cafés frequented by foreigners, but still gave them coffee such as we read about as found in Paris in “ye olden time.” In common with nearly all French families, she frequented every morning the coffee-shops scattered at convenient distances throughout the whole city, and selected her coffee in just the quantity required for the day, from the freshly-roasted mass, and saw it ground and mixed before her eyes. The custom is to combine three kinds of coffee—one for strength, and two for flavor, for the morning use. Then it is neither smoked, drenched nor boiled until the result is an injurious decoction, but, placed in its perforated cup, just boiling water enough is poured upon it to swell every grain and force it to yield up its delicious first aroma; then again and again is the bath repeated, until a half a teacupful will be all the coffee prepared for a household. Now, to a tablespoonful or two of this beverage she adds a cup of milk, heated almost to a boiling point, and the liquid is fit for a king. Quite another affair is the _café noir_, made usually by boiling the residue of the breakfast coffee, and religiously let alone by the occupants of many French homes. Out of doors, after coffee, for two or three good hours of work in museums, and galleries, and palaces, and churches, and streets, wherever the city offered anything to be enjoyed or learned, and then back to breakfast at twelve o’clock in the day, a meal of meats and vegetables, salads and sweets,—a dinner really in all but soup and a name. Dinner at six, cooked by the owner of the rooms, served by her daughter, a black-eyed, tidy girl of seventeen, comprised the _menu_ of the home. This was varied by an occasional raid upon the American gingerbread at the bakery of the Boulevard Malesherbes, or a visit to restaurants, where, at any price from thirty cents to a dollar and a half, according to location and appointments, one can be sure of a dinner, appetizing, clean, well-served, abundant, and so, whether one sits under the arches of the old historic Palais Royale, and takes history with his soup, and blends the gay kaleidoscopic throng before his eyes with the throngs that have filled the court in other days, or chooses his seat under the gilt and crystal of the glittering Boulevard des Italians, or boards at a pension at ten francs a day, and finds himself in a mitigated American