"Patti's photograph?" repeated the laundress. "Do ye mind the impidence of her, tellin' me a lie like that?" The English valet looked at the French maid and laughed. Then he explained, patronizingly: "Patty de four grass, as we call it in French--not Patti's photograph. It's a delicacy, and it's made of goose livers." "Then why couldn't that Dutch cook have said so?" the laundress asked, indignantly. "I've as good a right to know about a goose as ever she has. I misdoubt she was that poor where she came from they had never the grass of a goose to their cabin." "Did you see 'is lordship?" asked the valet. "I did that," the Irish girl replied, "an' what did I tell you about him? His head has grown through his hair! There's been good and bad harvests since he was young, I'm thinkin'--and it's mighty quare he looks about his eyes, too. It'll be a poor day for Miss Ethel when she marries a bald-headed ould runt like that, for all he's a lord!" "Oh, I say, Miss Maggie; you must not speak so disrespectful of his lordship," Parsons insisted; "really, now, you mustn't." "It's that Mrs. Playfair 'ud be the match for him, I'm thinkin'," said Maggie. "It's a bold-faced creature she is, an' no more clothes on her than ain't decent anyway. And then, how she looked at Mr. Van Allen and then at the bishop; and how she talked--I'd no patience with her. Do ye mind what it was I heard her say now?" "How could we know what you 'eard her say?" the valet responded, impatiently. "Sure, amn't I tellin' ye?" the Irish girl returned. "She was talkin' to the bishop, and she says, says she. 'The judge is a better man than you, bishop,' she says, 'leastwise he makes more people happy,' she says. 'How so?' says the bishop, says he. 'This way,' she says; 'when you marry a couple you make two people happy,' she says, 'an' when the judge divorces a couple he makes four people happy,' she says. Miss Ethel and the old lady with the white hair, they said nothin', but the rest of them laughed." What further fragments of the conversation at the dinner-table up-stairs Maggie had been able to gather during her brief visit to the butler's-pantry could not then be made known to the other domestics, for Tim came slouching into the sitting-room. "Say, Maggie," he began, "didn't you hear that ring at the bell? That's your feller--I seen him. He's out at the gate now." "Is it the letter-man you mean?" asked Maggie, adjusting her hair as she passed the looking-glass. "Ah, go on," returned Tim, impatiently, "what t'ell are you givin' us? How many fellers do you want, say?" After Maggie had chased Tim out of the room, the Swedish cook went to the dumb-waiter once more to send up the four smoking canvas-backs that lay luxuriously on their cushions of fried hominy.