Directly before it, however, to his consternation, were the massive, but timeworn, iron gates of a park, which Dick did not doubt was the one in which he had spent the previous night.  But it was impossible to go further in his present plight, and he boldly approached the restaurant.  As he was preparing to make his usual explanatory signs, to his great delight he was addressed in a quaint, broken English, mixed with forgotten American slang, by the white-trousered, black-alpaca coated proprietor.  More than that—­he was a Social Democrat and an enthusiastic lover of America—­had he not been to “Bos-town” and New York, and penetrated as far west as “Booflo,” and had much pleasure in that beautiful and free country?  Yes! it was a “go-a-’ed” country—­you “bet-your-lif’.”  One had reason to say so:  there was your electricity—­your street cars—­your “steambots”—­ah! such steambots—­and your “r-rail-r-roads.”  Ah! observe! compare your r-rail-r-roads and the buffet of the Pullman with the line from Paris, for example—­and where is one?  Nowhere!  Actually, positively, without doubt, nowhere!

Later, at an appetizing breakfast—­at which, to Dick’s great satisfaction, the good man had permitted and congratulated himself to sit at table with a free-born American—­he was even more loquacious.  For what then, he would ask, was this incompetence, this imbecility, of France?  He would tell.  It was the vile corruption of Paris, the grasping of capital and companies, the fatal influence of the still clinging noblesse, and the insidious Jesuitical power of the priests.  As for example, Monsieur “the Booflo-bil” had doubtless noticed the great gates of the park before the cafe?  It was the preserve,—­the hunting-park of one of the old grand seigneurs, still kept up by his descendants, the Comtes de Fontonelles—­hundreds of acres that had never been tilled, and kept as wild waste wilderness,—­kept for a day’s pleasure in a year!  And, look you! the peasants starving around its walls in their small garden patches and pinched farms!  And the present Comte de Fontonelles cascading gold on his mistresses in Paris; and the Comtesse, his mother, and her daughter living there to feed and fatten and pension a brood of plotting, black-cowled priests.  Ah, bah! where was your Republican France, then?  But a time would come.  The “Booflo-bil” had, without doubt, noticed, as he came along the road, the breaches in the wall of the park?

Dick, with a slight dry reserve, “reckoned that he had.”

“They were made by the scythes and pitchforks of the peasants in the Revolution of ’93, when the count was emigre, as one says with reason ‘skedadelle,’ to England.  Let them look the next time that they burn not the chateau,—­’bet your lif’!’”

“The chateau,” said Dick, with affected carelessness.  “Wot’s the blamed thing like?”