those friendly people are quite their own property, and I have no
intention of compelling them to an involuntary celebrity in these pages,
much as I should like to impart their quality to my narrative. In the
Strasbourgeoises we encountered again that pathos of an insulted and
down-trodden nationality which had cast its melancholy over our Venice
of Austrian days. German by name and by origin, these ladies were
intensely French in everything else. They felt themselves doomed to
exile in their own country, they abhorred their Prussian masters, and
they had no name for Bismarck that was bad enough. Our Swiss, indeed,
hated him almost as bitterly. Their sympathies had been wholly with the
French, and they could not repress a half-conscious dread of his
principle of race nationality, which would be fatal to Switzerland, one
neither in race nor religion, but hitherto indivisible in her ancient
freedom. While he lives this fear can never die in Swiss hearts, for
they know that if he will, he can, in a Europe where he is the only real
power.

Mademoiselle sat at the chief place of the table, and led the talk,
imparting to it a flavor of humorous good sense very characteristic. The
villa had been her father's country-house, and it abounded in a
scholar's accumulations of old books in divers languages. She herself
knew literature widely in the better way that it was once read. The
memories of many years spent in Florence made common Italian ground for
us, and she spoke English perfectly.

As I wish to give a complete notion of our household, so far as it may
be honestly set down, I will add that the domestics were three. Two of
them, the cook and the housemaid, were German Swiss, of middle class,
who had taken service to earn what money they could, but mainly to learn
French, after the custom of their country, where the young people of a