These beatitudes were few and far between. It would be infelicitous,
perhaps, to compare the occasional absences of a highly respectable
English tutor to an angel's visits, but so we felt them.

And then he would make up for it next afternoon, that conscientious
Englishman; which was fair enough to our parents, but not to us. And
then what extra severity, as interest for the beggarly loan of half an
afternoon! What rappings on ink-stained knuckles with a beastly, hard,
round, polished, heavy-wooded, business-like English ruler!

It was our way in those days to think that everything English was
beastly--an expression our parents thought we were much too fond
of using.

But perhaps we were not without some excuse for this unpardonable
sentiment. For there was _another_ English family in Passy--the
Prendergasts, an older family than ours--that is, the parents (and
uncles and aunts) were middle-aged, the grandmother dead, and the
children grown up. We had not the honor of their acquaintance. But
whether that was their misfortune and our fault (or _vice versa_) I
cannot tell. Let us hope the former.

They were of an opposite type to ours, and, though I say it, their type
was a singularly unattractive one; perhaps it may have been the original
of those caricatures of our compatriots by which French comic artists
have sought to avenge Waterloo. It was stiff, haughty, contemptuous. It
had prominent front teeth, a high nose, a long upper lip, a receding
jaw; it had dull, cold, stupid, selfish green eyes, like a pike's, that
swerved neither to right nor left, but looked steadily over peoples'
heads as it stalked along in its pride of impeccable British