But before she went to join her husband in the Belgic capital, Mrs.

Crawley made an expedition into England, leaving behind her her little

son upon the continent, under the care of her French maid.

The parting between Rebecca and the little Rawdon did not cause either

party much pain. She had not, to say truth, seen much of the young

gentleman since his birth. After the amiable fashion of French mothers,

she had placed him out at nurse in a village in the neighbourhood of

Paris, where little Rawdon passed the first months of his life, not

unhappily, with a numerous family of foster-brothers in wooden shoes.

His father would ride over many a time to see him here, and the elder

Rawdon's paternal heart glowed to see him rosy and dirty, shouting

lustily, and happy in the making of mud-pies under the superintendence

of the gardener's wife, his nurse.

Rebecca did not care much to go and see the son and heir. Once he

spoiled a new dove-coloured pelisse of hers. He preferred his nurse's

caresses to his mamma's, and when finally he quitted that jolly nurse

and almost parent, he cried loudly for hours. He was only consoled by

his mother's promise that he should return to his nurse the next day;

indeed the nurse herself, who probably would have been pained at the

parting too, was told that the child would immediately be restored to

her, and for some time awaited quite anxiously his return.

In fact, our friends may be said to have been among the first of that

brood of hardy English adventurers who have subsequently invaded the

Continent and swindled in all the capitals of Europe. The respect in

those happy days of 1817-18 was very great for the wealth and honour of

Britons. They had not then learned, as I am told, to haggle for

bargains with the pertinacity which now distinguishes them. The great

cities of Europe had not been as yet open to the enterprise of our

rascals. And whereas there is now hardly a town of France or Italy in

which you shall not see some noble countryman of our own, with that

happy swagger and insolence of demeanour which we carry everywhere,

swindling inn-landlords, passing fictitious cheques upon credulous

bankers, robbing coach-makers of their carriages, goldsmiths of their

trinkets, easy travellers of their money at cards, even public

libraries of their books--thirty years ago you needed but to be a Milor

Anglais, travelling in a private carriage, and credit was at your hand

wherever you chose to seek it, and gentlemen, instead of cheating, were

cheated. It was not for some weeks after the Crawleys' departure that

the landlord of the hotel which they occupied during their residence at

Paris found out the losses which he had sustained: not until Madame

Marabou, the milliner, made repeated visits with her little bill for

articles supplied to Madame Crawley; not until Monsieur Didelot from

Boule d'Or in the Palais Royal had asked half a dozen times whether

cette charmante Miladi who had bought watches and bracelets of him was

de retour. It is a fact that even the poor gardener's wife, who had

nursed madame's child, was never paid after the first six months for

that supply of the milk of human kindness with which she had furnished

the lusty and healthy little Rawdon. No, not even the nurse was

paid--the Crawleys were in too great a hurry to remember their trifling

debt to her. As for the landlord of the hotel, his curses against the

English nation were violent for the rest of his natural life. He asked

all travellers whether they knew a certain Colonel Lor Crawley--avec sa

femme une petite dame, tres spirituelle. "Ah, Monsieur!" he would

add--"ils m'ont affreusement vole." It was melancholy to hear his

accents as he spoke of that catastrophe.




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