for it enabled her to give me the most delightful parody upon it that could be imagined. Only once did I hear her speak with bitterness in referring to any one; but when she began upon this occasion, she spoke not only bitterly, but wrathfully--contemptuously as well. She was referring to the Emperor Napoleon III. in his relations with the unhappy Maximilian of Mexico. She had known the latter intimately. My own impression is that she had been in love with him--and tears were in her eyes when she talked of how he had been betrayed by the man whom she called a contemptible little cad. Sedan represented, in her way of thinking, the cordial agreement with her views by the Powers above. To hear her talk of those tragedies of more than forty years ago, as if they were the incidents of the day before yesterday, was inspiriting. I never inquired what was her age, but one afternoon when I called upon her I found that a birthday party was going on--a double party; for it was her birthday as well as her youngest grandchild's. Two fully iced cakes, with pink and white complexions, were being illuminated in the customary way, and each had been made a candelabrum of eight tapers. When I ventured to suggest that there must be an error in computation in some direction, it was the younger of the beneficiaries who explained to me that about seventy years or so ago Granny had become too old to allow of her birthday cake holding the full amount of the candles to which she was entitled, so it had been agreed that she should have only one candle for every ten years of her life. The little girl confided in me that she thought it was rather a shame to cheat poor Granny out of her rights, but of course there was no help for it: any one could see that no cake could be made large enough to accommodate, without undue crowding, eighty-one candles. I looked at the sweet old Granny, and thought, for some reason or other, of the night of the first January of the century when I had stood listening to the tolling of the eighty-one strokes of the church bell in Devonshire, when every belfry in the kingdom announced the age of the good Queen who had gone to her rest. I wondered...