there. Here I had painted through a prolific summer of my youth, and I
was glad to find--as I had hoped--nothing changed; for the place was
dear to me. Madame Brossard (dark, thin, demure as of yore, a fine-
looking woman with a fine manner and much the flavour of old Norman
portraits) gave me a pleasant welcome, remembering me readily but
without surprise, while Amedee, the antique servitor, cackled over me
and was as proud of my advent as if I had been a new egg and he had laid
me. The simile is grotesque; but Amedee is the most henlike waiter in
France.

He is a white-haired, fat old fellow, always well-shaved; as neat as a
billiard-ball. In the daytime, when he is partly porter, he wears a
black tie, a gray waistcoat broadly striped with scarlet, and, from
waist to feet, a white apron like a skirt, and so competently encircling
that his trousers are of mere conventionality and no real necessity; but
after six o'clock (becoming altogether a maitre d'hotel) he is clad as
any other formal gentleman. At all times he wears a fresh table-cloth
over his arm, keeping an exaggerated pile of them ready at hand on a
ledge in one of the little bowers of the courtyard, so that he may never
be shamed by getting caught without one.

His conception of life is that all worthy persons were created as
receptacles for food and drink; and five minutes after my arrival he had
me seated (in spite of some meek protests) in a wicker chair with a
pitcher of the right Three Pigeons cider on the table before me, while
he subtly dictated what manner of dinner I should eat. For this interval
Amedee's exuberance was sobered and his badinage dismissed as being
mere garniture, the questions now before us concerning grave and inward
matters. His suggestions were deferential but insistent; his manner was
that of a prime minister who goes through the form of convincing the