This morning, when I was talking with Miss Pondar about fish, and trying to show her that I knew something about the names of English fishes, I said that we was very fond of whitebait.  At this she looked astonished for the first time.

“Whitebait?” said she.  “We always looked upon that as belonging entirely to the nobility and gentry.”  At this my back began to bristle, but I didn’t let her know it, and I said, in a tone of emphatic mildness, that we would have whitebait twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday.  At this Miss Pondar gave a little courtesy and thanked me very much, and said she would attend to it.

When Jone and me came back after taking a long walk that morning I saw a pair of Church of England prayer-books, looking as if they had just been neatly dusted, lying on the parlor table, where they hadn’t been before, for I had carefully looked over every book.  I think that when it was borne in upon Miss Pondar’s soul that we was accustomed to having whitebait as a regular thing she made up her mind we was all right, and that nothing but the Established Church would do for us.  Before, she might have thought we was Wesleyans.

Our maid Hannah is very nice to look at, and does her work as well as anybody could do it, and, like most other English servants, she’s in a state of never-ending thankfulness, but as I can never understand a word she says except “Thank you very much,” I asked Jone if he didn’t think it would be a good thing for me to try to teach her a little English.

“Now then,” said he, “that’s the opening of a big subject.  Wait until I fill my pipe and we’ll discourse upon it.”  It was just after luncheon, and we was sitting in the summer-house at the end of the garden, looking out over the roses and pinks and all sorts of old-timey flowers growing as thick as clover heads, with an air as if it wasn’t the least trouble in the world to them to flourish and blossom.  Beyond the flowers was a little brook with the ducks swimming in it, and beyond that was a field, and on the other side of that field was a park belonging to the lord of the manor, and scattered about the side of a green hill in the park was a herd of his lordship’s deer.  Most of them was so light-colored that I fancied I could almost see through them, as if they was the little transparent bugs that crawl about on leaves.  That isn’t a romantic idea to have about deers, but I can’t get rid of the notion whenever I see those little creatures walking about on the hills.

At that time it was hardly raining at all, just a little mist, with the sun coming into the summer-house every now and then, making us feel very comfortable and contented.

“Now,” said Jone, when he had got his pipe well started, “what I want to talk about is the amount of reformation we expect to do while we’re sojourning in the kingdom of Great Britain.”

“Reformation!” said I; “we didn’t come here to reform anything.”