"It is a fresco on the wall of a chamber--subject, the Nativity--and the animals therein are made to publish the event in words supposed to resemble their characteristic sounds and cries. A cock, crowing, is perched at the top, and a label from out his mouth has the words, 'Christus natus est!' 'Quando, quando?' quacks the duck. Hoarsely the raven, 'In hæ nocte.' 'Ubi? ubi?' inquires the cow. And, 'Bethlehem,' bleats out the lamb."
"Oh, Mrs. Stainton, I beg your pardon," suddenly called out the ex-Anglican parson from the foot of the table, and despatching a servant with a plate to the little widow. "I quite forgot your predilection."
"But somebody else may like the _inner consciousness_ too," returned she, transferring to her own plate the fowl's gizzard sent. "You make me feel like a terrible old French aunt of mine--a _gourmande_ who spent two or three hours every day in consultation with her cook, a man, concerning her for the most part solitary dinner, and who was at the last found dead with her cook-book lying open on her knee! My oldest brother, when a little fellow, dined with her one day. In his helping of fowl was included the inner consciousness. Childlike, he put this tid-bit carefully aside as a delicious last morsel. But the old lady eyed his plate with great discontent, growing every moment more grim. Finally she could bear it no longer, and, poising her fork, she dexterously harpooned the _bonne-bouche_, and triumphantly transferred it to her own plate, remarking to the dreadfully disappointed child, 'I see, my nephew, that you don't love this little portion. Now _I_ do, so it is best I should have it.' We none of us could tolerate this aunt, but my brother's feeling toward her ever after was really venomous in its spitefulness."
"That reminds me," said the Scotchman, "that I saw a photograph of Dixblanc to-day, and was astonished to find her not at all an evil-looking person. I quite believe now that she murdered her mistress in a fit of passion, as she says, and not at all for robbery. And there must have been awful provocation. Fancy living with a disreputable, avaricious, nagging old Frenchwoman!"
"But how worse than with an old Englishwoman of like characteristics?" asked somebody.