At Jacournassy, the country seat of Mme. Berry, whose daughter my son
Theodore married, I spent a month full of surprises. How everything
differed from America, and even from the plain below! The peasants, many
of them at least, can neither speak French nor understand it. Their
language is a patois, resembling both Spanish and Italian, and they
cling to it with astonishing pertinacity. Their agricultural implements
are not less quaint than their speech. The plow is a long beam with a
most primitive share in the middle, a cow at one end, and a boy at the
other. The grain is cut with a sickle and threshed with a flail on the
barn floor, as in Scripture times. Manure is scattered over the fields
with the hands. There was a certain pleasure in studying these old-time
ways. I caught glimpses of the anti-revolutionary epoch, when the king
ruled the state and the nobles held the lands. Here again I saw, as
never before, what vast strides the world has made within one century.

But, indoors, one returns to modern times. The table, beds, rooms of the
château were much the same as those of Toulouse and New York city. The
cooking is not like ours, however, unless Delmonico's skill be supposed
to have extended to all the homes in Manhattan Island, which is,
unfortunately, not the case. What an admirable product of French genius
is the art of cooking! Of incalculable value have been the culinary
teachings of Vatel and his followers.

One of the sources of amusement, during my sojourn at Jacournassy, was
of a literary nature. My son Theodore was then busy collecting the
materials for his book entitled "The Woman Question in Europe," and
every post brought in manuscripts and letters from all parts of the
continent, written in almost every tongue known to Babel. So just what I
came abroad to avoid, I found on the very threshold where I came to
rest. We had good linguists at the château, and every document finally