the water, the gigot into the oven, by and by one makes the mouth-wrying tea, the tisane that so ravages the interior—and the dinner is served. One eats, one is fed, it is true; but that is not to say one has dined. The very stomach is an exile in this land.”
And Philippe sadly assented. He knew so well that dinner, even now awaiting him at Mrs. Brown’s. A thousand times already he had eaten of it, and the thousand and first made no appeal to him. Most of all did his languid appetite resent the suggestion of that “long-stood” cup of tea. Tea, indeed! Again he seemed to smell the aroma of that coffee, freshly roasting at the store; and again it spoke to him of comforts, not so much of the body as of the mind, the heart.
They talked on and on, still in the old pleasant dialect. Nanette was younger than Philippe; she had married early in life, and so had her son, the father of Joseph; still, she was able to tell her countryman the fortunes of nearly all the old friends he so eagerly inquired after, and, alas, alas! those fortunes, as it seemed, with scarcely one exception, were all finished! Philippe felt his heart, his horizon, painfully contract. Each death, as Nanette recorded it in her simple chronicle, sounded to him like yet another stroke of the tolling bell at the burial of all that had once made Home. He sighed again and again as she proceeded. What was there left? And yet, for all the sadness, what a sweetness, too, in hearing again those well-loved names, in speaking the remembered childhood tongue, in being understood!
“Gran’ma! gran’ma!” called suddenly a very
