My Library

“Now, of all mortals it is most unsafe and dangerous to flatter a French woman, and madame was French all the way through; consequently she determined, on so fitting an occasion, to prove her husband’s encomiums perfectly well founded; and she began the display with a quotation from the Bard of Avon’s Midsummer Night’s Dream. “ ‘Ah, mon ange avec les bottes—my angel in boots—do you not know that Joseph has been a poet ever since I instructed him in trochees, dactyls, spondees, dythyrambics, hexameters, iambics, acatalectics, and—anapests—and’—— “ ‘Oh, may the devil fly away with all of your Anna cats, or Mary cats!—damn all cats! And as for your Anna Pests—why, what’s she got to do with Joseph? Is she another grisette the fellow’s running after? Why, that’s fifteen different women in fifteen weeks. I can’t see how the fellow’s constitution stands it: and then you’ve done the introducing business? Shame on you— you ought to be’—— “Here I stepped in and told the gardener that his lady did not mean cats or females, but simply feet, measures, and scansions of poetry. This mollified him, and the lady courtesied to me, and resumed: “ ‘Yes, darling—ogre’—this last was spoken sub voce—‘yes, dearest, the gentleman’s right. Joseph is a poet; Pierre is a lunatic; and the gentleman