Various

“ Nothing is more noticeable among the French than their superior intelligence in dietary matters; every one seems naturally a judge, a dilettante. They have analyzed tastes and savors to a finer point than we; they are aware of differences and relations of which we take no heed. Observe a Frenchman of any age and of any station (I have been quite as much struck with it in the very young men as in the old) as he orders his breakfast or his dinner at a Parisian restaurant, and you will perceive that the operation is much more solemn than it is apt to be in New York or in London. ”

“ I wonder that Wilson Flagg did not include the cow among his "Picturesque Animals," for that is where she belongs. She has not the classic beauty of the horse, but in picture-making qualities she is far ahead of him. Her shaggy, loose-jointed body, her irregular, sketchy outlines, like those of the landscape—the hollows and ridges, the slopes and prominences—her tossing horns, her bushy tail, her swinging gait, her tranquil, ruminating habits—all tend to make her an object upon which the artist eye loves to dwell. The artists are for ever putting her into pictures too. ”

“ Neither walls nor hedges or fences are anywhere visible; the whole land lies open to the breezes and to his curious footsteps. This universal absence of barriers gives an air of vastness to the landscape, so that really, in a little French province, you have more of the feeling of being in a big country than on our own huge continent, which bristles so unconsciously with prohibitory rails and stone-piles. Norman farmhouses, too, with their mossy roofs and their visible beams making all kinds of triangles upon the ancient plaster of their walls, are very delightful things. ”

“ But this is one of those fond and over-subtle misapprehensions from which Shakespeare has suffered in not a few instances, even at the hands of critics of reputation. It suited Shakespeare's plot that the villain should be the bastard; that is all; and Lear's legitimate daughters Goneril and Regan are as base, as bad, and as cruelly ungrateful as Gloucester's illegitimate son. Shakespeare knew human nature too well, and handled it with too just and impartial a hand, to let the question of legitimacy influence him in one way or the other. ”

“ They have always a cigarette in their teeth.
The best thing at Biarritz is your opportunity for driving over into Spain. Coming speedily to a consciousness of this fact, I found a charm in sitting in a landau and rolling away to San Sebastian, behind a driver in a high glazed hat with long streamers, a jacket of scarlet and silver, and a pair of yellow breeches and of jack-boots. If it has been the desire of one's heart and the dream of one's life to visit the land of Cervantes, even grazing it so lightly as by a day's excursion from Biarritz is a matter to set one romancing. ”

“ The door opens, and a tall young girl, dressed in a white morning costume, comes silently in; there is a strange and piteous look of trouble in her dark eyes. Anatolia goes over to her, and takes her hand very tenderly, and leads her to the easy-chair she had herself just quitted.
"There is not any letter yet?" she asks, having looked all round the table with a sad and wearied air.
"No, dear, not yet," says Anatolia, who, unlovely though she may be, has a sympathetic heart; and her lip trembles as she speaks. "You must be patient, Violet." ”

“ One evening, sitting on the verandah with Beardsley, smoking, and looking in the open windows of the parlor, I noticed a woman who sat a little apart, and who, as I fancied, was avoided by the younger girls. In a Virginia country party there are always two or three unmarried women, past their first youth, with merry blue eyes, brown hair, and delicate features—women "with a history," but who are none the less good dancers, riders, and able to put all their cleverness into the making of a pie or a match for their cousins. ”

“ Into the midst of this "la Rabillon" or "la Mère Léger" brings forward her chairs and begs us to be seated, and seating herself, with crossed hands, smiles handsomely and answers abundantly all questions about her cow, her husband, her bees, her eggs, and her last-born. The men linger half outside and half in, with their shoulders against dressers and door-posts; every one smiles, with that simple, clear-eyed smile of the gratified peasant; they talk much more like George Sand's Berrichons than might be supposed. ”

“ She always had the first place anywhere. She had her choice of standing room in the milking yard, and when she wanted to lie down there or in the fields the best and softest spot was hers. When the herd were foddered from the stack or barn, or fed with pumpkins in the fall, she was always first served. Her demeanor was quiet but impressive. She never bullied or gored her mates, but literally ruled them with the breath of her nostrils. If any newcomer or ambitious younger cow, however, chafed under her supremacy, she was ever ready to make good her claims. ”

“ Ah, when that creaking and sagging back gate closed behind me in the evening, I was happy; and when it opened for my egress thence in the morning, I was not happy. Inside that gate was a miniature farm redolent of homely, primitive life, a tumble-down house and stables and implements of agriculture and horticulture, broods of chickens, and growing pumpkins, and a thousand antidotes to the weariness of an artificial life. Outside of it were the marble and iron palaces, the paved and blistering streets, and the high, vacant, mahogany desk of a government clerk. ”

“ Emancipation was a necessary, not a revolutionary measure, forced upon the Administration by the secessionists themselves, who insisted that slavery which was local and sectional should be made national.
The war was, in fact, defensive on the part of the Government against a sectional insurrection which had seized the fortresses and public property of the nation; a war for the maintenance of the Union, not for its dissolution; a war for the preservation of individual, State, and Federal rights; good administration would permit neither to be sacrificed nor one to encroach on the other. ”

“ She licks him out of the fogs and bewilderments and uncertainties in which he finds himself on first landing upon these shores, and up on to his feet in an incredibly short time. Indeed, that potent tongue of hers can almost make the dead alive any day, and the creative lick of the old Scandinavian mother cow is only a large-lettered rendering of the commonest facts.
The horse belongs to the fiery god Mars. He favors war, and is one of its oldest, most available, and most formidable engines. The steed is clothed with thunder, and smells the battle from afar ”

“ Why should we bring in a famous lawyer to sit in judgment on her as if the girl were a criminal? She only did, Floyd, what women have done since the beginning—changed her mind without reason. Paul Merrick was as clever and lovable a young fellow as you would find in the State, and Louisa was faithful to him—she's faithful to him yet; but on the night before the wedding she refused to marry him, and has persisted in the refusal ever since, without assigning a cause. ”

“ FROM NORMANDY TO THE PYRENEES.
The other day, before the first fire of winter, when the deepening dusk had compelled me to close my book and wheel my chair closer, I indulged in a retrospect. The objects of it were not far distant, and yet they seemed already to glow with the mellow tints of the days that are no more. In the crackling flame the last remnant of the summer appeared to shrink up and vanish. But the flicker of its destruction made a sort of fantastic imagery, and in the midst of the winter fire the summer sunshine seemed to glow. It lit up a series of visible memories. ”

“ The cow belongs more especially to the northern peoples, to the region of the good, green grass. She is the true grazing animal. That broad, smooth, always dewy nose of hers is just the suggestion of green sward. She caresses the grass; she sweeps off the ends of the leaves; she reaps it with the soft sickle of her tongue. She crops close, but she does not bruise or devour the turf like the horse. She is the sward's best friend, and will make it thick and smooth as a carpet.
The turfy mountains where live the nibbling sheep
are not for her. ”

“ Of course he had an excellent appetite; but there is something rather cruel in those alternations of diet to which the French parish priest is subjected. At home he lives like a peasant—a fact which, in itself, is not particularly cruel, inasmuch as he is usually a peasant born. But his fellow peasants don't breakfast at the château and gaze adown the savory vistas opened by cutlets à la Soubise. They have not the acute pain of being turned back into the stale atmosphere of bread and beans. Of course it is by no means every day or every week even that M. le Curé breakfasts at the château ”

“ The bully of the yard is never the master, but usually a second or third-rate pusher that never loses an opportunity to hook those beneath her, or to gore the masters if she can get them in a tight place. If such a one can get loose in the stable, she is quite certain to do mischief. She delights to pause in the open bars and turn and keep those at bay behind her till she sees a pair of threatening horns pressing toward her, when she quickly passes on. As one cow masters all, so there is one cow that is mastered by all. These are the two extremes of the herd, the head and the tail. ”

“ The whole country not in rebellion had declared there should be no secession, division, or destruction of the Federal Union, but here was the most conspicuous leader of the Republican party in the Senate proposing a scheme to punish a State, to annihilate and destroy its government, to territorialize it, to exclude or expel it from the Union, to make no discrimination in its exclusions and denunciations between the loyal and disloyal inhabitants, but to punish alike, without trial or conviction, the just and the unjust. ”

“ For the native blooded cow of Virginia, from shivering over half rations of corn stalks, in the open air, during those bleak and windy winters, and roaming over those parched fields in summer, has come to have some marked features. For one thing, her pedal extremities seemed lengthened; for another, her udder does not impede her travelling; for a third, her backbone inclines strongly to the curve; then, she despiseth hay. This last is a sure test. Offer a thorough-bred Virginia cow hay, and she will laugh in your face; but rattle the husks or shucks, and she knows you to be her friend. ”

“ Fine wines are a perquisite of money. The fortunate aristocrat and the house of Israel, which everywhere waxes fat on the needs of travellers, may sip their champagne, their Lachrymæ Christi, and their Hockheimer, while less favored humanity contents itself with sour vin ordinaire; but beer is the same for all, and in some breweries each one must search for a glass, rinse it, and present himself in his turn at the shank window, to which there is no royal road. "La bière," which a great writer calls "ce vin de la réforme," is essentially a democratic drink. ”

“ A petted and well-fed cow has a benevolent and gracious look; an ill-used and poorly-fed one a pitiful and forlorn look. Some cows have a masculine or ox expression; others are extremely feminine. The latter are the ones for milk. Some cows will kick like a horse; some jump fences like deer. Every herd has its ringleader, its unruly spirit—one that plans all the mischief and leads the rest through the fences into the grain or into the orchard. ”

“ I toiled up the perpendicular cliff again, and took my way over the grass, for another hour, to Fécamp, where I found the peculiarities of Yport directly reversed. The place is a huge, straggling village, seated along a wide, shallow bay, and adorned, of course, with the classic Casino and the row of hotels. But all this is on a very brave scale, though it is not manifest that the bravery of Fécamp has won a victory; and, indeed, the local attractions did not strike me as irresistible. A pebbly beach of immense length, fenced off from the town by a grassy embankment ”

“ I assent to the common tradition that the French are a temperate people, so long as it is understood in this sense—that they eat no more than they want to. But they want to eat so much! Their capacity strikes me as enormous, and we ourselves, if we are less regulated, are certainly much more slender consumers.
The American breakfast has, I believe, long been a subject of irony to the foreign observer; but the American breakfast is an ascetic meal compared with the French déjeuner à la fourchette. ”

“ It is very still, deliciously rural, and immitigably French. Normandy is Norman, Gascony is Gascon, but this is France itself—the typical, average, "pleasant" France of history, literature, and art—of art, of landscape art, perhaps, especially. Wherever I look in the country I seem to see one of the familiar pictures on a dealer's wall—a Lambinet, a Troyon, a Daubigny, a Diaz. The Lambinets perhaps are in the majority; the mood of the landscape usually expresses itself in silvery lights and vivid greens. ”

“ When she came to the wigwam it was not to chat merrily of the affairs of the mission. She did not braid as many baskets as formerly, and no longer showed him new patterns in shell mosaic on the lids of little boxes. He was a curious old man, and he soon drew her secret from her. Marie loved Père François Xavier, and he had gone.
The Black Beaver went down to the mission one evening and had a long talk with Father Ignatius. He ascertained first that Père François Xavier really meant to return; then, with all the dignity of an old feudal baron, he offered Marie as a bride for his spiritual son. ”

“ Where the daisy and the buttercup and clover bloom, and where corn will grow, is her proper domain. The agriculture of no country can long thrive without her. Not only a large part of the real, but much of the potential wealth of the land is wrapped up in her.
What a variety of individualities a herd of cows presents when you have come to know them all, not only in form and color, but in manners and disposition. Some are timid and awkward and the butt of the whole herd. ”

“ The first who reaches it carries it off in triumph to the spring in the anteroom, rinses it, and presents himself behind a queue of predecessors at the shank window, where several pairs of hands are occupied all day long in filling mugs from the great casks within. This accomplished, he returns to the guest room and searches for a seat. If found, it is certainly not luxurious—a wooden bench of pine, stained by time and continual use to a dark dirt color, behind an ancient table. The walls and ceiling are grim with age, and the atmosphere hazy with smoke. ”

“ Her smile no longer seemed to irritate him, and a close observer might have noticed that she smiled less than formerly. He talked with her more, paid closer attention to her studies, made her little presents from time to to time, and spoke to her always with studied gentleness that was quite foreign to his nature. And Marie watched him at work over his stones, spent her spare time in rambling in search of those which she had learned he liked, and laid upon his table without remark each new discovery of quartz, or crystal, or pebble. ”

“ If we hold with Scripture that he who ruleth his spirit is greater than he that taketh a city, we must not give all the laurels of success to the mighty, wealthy, witty, and renowned. Poor John Jones, the clerk yonder at a thousand a year, if we reckon at anything gentleness, courage, simplicity, devotion to mother, wife, and babes, has made as great a success of life as old Rollin Ritchie, the head of the house. ”

“ People presented themselves with a calmness and freshness very different from the haggard legacy of that fevered investigation which precedes the annual exodus of the American citizen and his family. This impression, with me, rests perhaps on the fact that most Frenchwomen turned of thirty—the average wives and mothers—are so comfortably fat. I have never seen such massive feminine charms as among the mature baigneuses of Etratal. The lean and desiccated person into whom a dozen years of matrimony so often converts the blooming American girl has no apparent correlative in the French race. ”

“ Not until the nullifiers were defeated, and had failed to draw the South into their nullification plan, was slavery agitation introduced into Congress and made a sectional party question with aggressive demands for national protection. The abolitionists were few in numbers, and of little account in American politics. Some benevolent Quakers and uneasy fanatics, who neither comprehended the structure of our Federal system nor cared for the Constitution, had annually for forty years petitioned Congress to give freedom to the slaves. ”