be amusing on our darker side, cannot spell the word theatre; but he is trenchant when dealing with what he saw at the Adelphi Theater.  How completely he must have understood the dialogue, he who describes Webster as a comique de premier ordre! In the same paper the dramatic critic, after explaining that at the rehearsals of L’Abime, the actors, who continually are complaining that they are ordered off on the wrong side, are quieted with the information that matters dramatic are managed in this way in bizzare England—­prints in a line apart, and by way of most humorous comment, these words, ‘English spoken here.’  Conceive, my dear, an English humorous writer interlarding his picture of a French incident with the occasional interjection of Parlez-vous Francais? Yet the comic writers of Paris imagine that they show wit when they pepper their comments with disjointed, irrelevant, and misspelt ejaculations in our vernacular.  We have a friend here (we have made dozens) who has a cat she calls To-be—­the godfather being ’To-be or not to be!  ‘All right’ appears daily as a witticism; ‘Oh, yes!’ serves for the thousandth time as a touch of humour.  The reason is obvious.  French critics are wholly ignorant of our language.  Very few of them have crossed the Channel, even to obtain a Leicester Square idea of our dear England.  But they are not diffident on this account.  They have never seen samples of the Britisher—­except on the Boulevards, or whistling in the cafes—­where our countrymen, I beg leave to say, do not shine; and these to them are representations of our English society.  Suppose we took our estimate of French manners and culture from the small shopkeepers of the Quartier St. Antoine!  My protest is against those who judge us by our vulgar and coarse types.  The Manchester bully who lounges into the Cafe Anglais with his hat on the back of his head; the woman who wears a hat and a long blue veil, and shuffles in in the wake of the malhonnete to whom she is married; again, the boor who can speak only such French as ’moa besoin’ and ‘j’avais faim,’ represent English men and women just as fairly as the rude, hoggish, French egg-and-poultry speculators represent the great seigneurs of France.

[Illustration:  SMITH BRINGS HIS ALPENSTOCK.]

“I say I have, by this time, more than a tolerable experience, not only of French salons, but also of those over which foreign residents in Paris preside.  I have watched the American successes in Paris of this season, which is now closing its gilded gates, dismissing the slaves of pleasure to the bitter waters of the German springs and gaming-tables.  I have seen our people put aside for Madame de Lhuile de Petrole and the great M. Caligula Shoddy.  The beauties of the season have been ‘calculating’ and ‘going round’ in the best salons, and they have themselves given some of the most successful entertainments we have had.  Dixie’s land has been fairyland.  Strange and gorgeous Princesses