"What is that fine building?" I said, pointing to a picture on the wall.
"Oh! that is the 'Hospice de Sainte Priscille,' which Antoine has erected in Paris. People there call it 'La Marquise.'"
"By the way," said Priscilla's mother, who sat by, "Antoine is coming to see us next month, and is to look after his Slabtown friends when he comes. They used to call him at first 'Priscilla's Frenchman.'"
And to this day Miss More declares that markusses is a thing she can't no ways understand.
1871.
TALKING FOR LIFE.
For many years following the war I felt that I owed a grudge to the medical faculty. Having a romantic temperament and a taste for heroics, I had wished to fight and eat hard tack for my country. But whenever I presented the feeble frame in which I then dwelt, the medical man stood in my path with the remonstrance, "Why should you fill another cot in a hospital and another strip in the graveyard?" In these late years I have been cured of my regrets; not by service-pension slogans and pension agents' circulars, as you may imagine, but by the war reminiscence which has flooded the magazines, invaded every social circle, and rendered the listener's life a burden. In any group of men of my own age, North or South, I do not dare introduce any military topic, not even the Soudan campaign of General Wolseley, or the East Indian yarns of Private Mulvaney, lest I should bring down upon my head stories of campaigning on the Shenandoah, the Red River, or the Rappahannock—stories that have gained like rolling snowballs during the rolling years. Not that the war reminiscence is inherently tedious, but it is frightfully overworked. A scientific friend of mine of great endurance has discovered, by a series of prolonged observations and experiments at the expense of his own health, that only one man in twenty-seven hundred and forty-six can tell a story well, and that only one in forty-three can narrate a personal experience bearably. If I had gone into the army the chances are forty-two to one that I should have bored my friends intolerably from that day to this, and twenty-seven hundred and forty-five to one against my stories having anything engaging in them. I thank Heaven for the medical man that made me stay at home.
But once in a while it has been my luck to meet among old soldiers the twenty-seven hundred and forty-sixth man who can tell a story well. Ben Tillye is one of them, and here is an anecdote I heard from him, which is rather interesting, and which may even be true:
"I had just been promoted to a first lieutenancy, and thought that I saw a generalship in the dim distance. Why, with such prospects, I should have straggled right into the arms of three bushwhackers, I do not know.