Page:Our Philadelphia (Pennell, 1914).djvu/111

Rh generation: the memory of Signor Blitz, on a more than usually blissful Reverend Mother's Feast, taking rabbits out of our hats and bowls of gold-fish out of his sleeve, and holding a long conversation with the immortal Bobby, the most prodigious puppet that ever conversed with any professional ventriloquist. But this was a rare ecstasy never repeated.

What games the children in Rittenhouse Square and the Lanes of Germantown had, I cannot record, but of one thing I am sure: they did not go to the tune and the words of "Sur le pont d' Avignon," or "Qu' est-ce qui passe ici si tard," or "Il était un avocat." Nor, I fancy, were "Malbrough s'en va-t'en guerre" and "Au clair de la lune, mon ami Pierrot," the songs heard in the Philadelphia nursery. Nor is it likely that "C'est le mois de Marie," which we sang as lustily all through May as the devout in France sing it in every church and every cathedral from one end of their land to the other, was the canticle of pious little Catholic children celebrating the month of Mary at St. Joseph's or St. Patrick's. Nor outside the Convent could the Bishop on his pastoral rounds have been welcomed with the "Vive! Vive! Vive! Monseigneur au Sacré Coeur, Quel Bonheur!" which, the title appropriately changed, was our form of welcome to every distinguished visitor. And, singing these songs and canticles, how could the associations and memories we were laying up for ourselves be the same as those of Philadelphia children whose ears and voices were trained on "Juanita"