there was something conciliatory and national in a Southern colonel offering to take Bigelow to see Menken at the Gaite, or when I saw some West Pointers and a nephew of Beauregard’s lighting the pipe of peace at a handsome tobacconist’s in the Rue Saint-Honore.  The consciousness that we have no longer a nationality, and that nobody respects us, adds a singular calm, an elevation, to our views.  Composed as our cherished little society is of crumbs from every table under heaven, we have succeeded in forming a way of life where the crusty fortitude and integrity of patriotism is unnecessary.  Our circle is like the green palace of the magpies in Musset’s Merle Blanc, and like them we live “de plaisir, d’honneur, de bavardage, de gloire et de chiffons.”

[Illustration:  The ferry.]

[Illustration:  JOVE’S thunder.]

I confess that there was a period, between the fresh alacrity of a stranger’s reception in the Colony and the settled habits I have now fallen into, when I was rather uneasy.  A society of migrators, a system woven upon shooting particles, like a rainbow on the rain, was odd.  Residents of some permanency, like myself, were constantly forming eternal friendships with people who wrote to them in a month or two from Egypt.  In this way a quantity of my friendships were miserably lacerated, until I learned by practice just how much friendship to give.  At this period I was much occupied with vain conciliations, concessions and the reconciling of inconsistencies.  A brave American from the South, an ardent disciple of Calhoun, was a powerful advocate of State Rights, and advocated them so well that I was almost convinced; when it appeared one day that the right of States to individual action was to cease in cases where a living chattel was to escape from the South to the North.

[Illustration:  School.]

In this case the State, in violation of its own laws unrecognizant of that kind of ownership, was to account for the property and give it back, in obedience to general Congressional order and to the most advanced principles of Centralization.  Before I had digested this pill another was administered to me in that small English section of our circle which gave us much pride and an occasional son-in-law.  This was by no less a person than my dear old friend Berkley, now grown a ruddy sexagenarian, but still given to eating breakfast in his bath-tub.  The wealthy Englishman, who had got rich by exporting china ware, was sound on the subject of free commerce between nations.  That any industry, no matter how young might be the nation practicing it, or how peculiar the difficulties of its prosecution, should ever be the subject of home protection, he stamped as a fallacy too absurd to be argued.  The journals venturing such an opinion were childish drivelers, putting forth views long since exploded before the whole world.  He was still loud in this opinion when his little book