The coffee is almighty hot.

How do you say that in French ?" Every day, then, for the following three weeks, the minutely respectable figure of M.Nioche made its appearance, with a series of little inquiring and apologetic obeisances, among the aromatic fumes of Newman's morning beverage.

I don't know how much French our friend learned, but, as he himself said, if the attempt did him no good, it could at any rate do him no harm.

And it amused him; it gratified that irregularly sociable side of his nature which had always expressed itself in a relish for ungrammatical conversation, and which often, even in his busy and preoccupied days, had made him sit on rail fences in young Western towns, in the twilight, in gossip hardly less than fraternal with humorous loafers and obscure fortune-seekers.

He had notions, wherever he went, about talking with the natives; he had been assured, and his judgment approved the advice, that in traveling abroad it was an excellent thing to look into the life of the country.