modest place she had in the world; and I have known many a wealthier woman who might with reason have envied this bright little French nurse,—an honour to her country, her sphere, and her sex. I have seldom parted with a roadside friend with keener regret.
My next friend of the working class, and she, I am proud to say, is a friend of several years' standing, is my Parisian washerwoman. But here, I am bound to confess, I am fronted with an exceptional character,—witty, brilliant, of a liberal and bountiful nature, and original almost to the point of genius. My washerwoman comes every Tuesday, and brings gaiety and delightful wit along with her. She is all sorts of odd things together: a fierce Nationalist, a hard politician, a violent atheist, a hater of Jesuits and freemasons, inclined to Protestantism, if, unfortunately, the English were not Protestants already; intelligent enough not to have been dazzled by the Russian alliance, even when all France went mad on the Czar's visit. "He wants our money, mademoiselle," she said to me in those mad times, "and we are fools enough to believe in his friendship." Whenever you mention the Russian alliance to her, she promptly asks who has seen that alliance written out on paper, stamped, and signed. And at the time of the Dreyfus Affair she could tell me to a centime the sum the Jews and the English had
