It seems to me that I have sung the praises of Barfleur as a directing manager quite sufficiently for one book; but I shall have to begin anew. He arrived as usual very brisk, a porter carrying four or five pieces of luggage, his fur coat over his arm, his monocle gleaming as though it had been freshly polished, a cane and an umbrella in hand, and inquiring crisply whether I had secured the particular position on deck which he had requested me to secure and hold. If it were raining, according to a slip of paper on which he had written instructions days before I left London, I was to enter the cabin of the vessel which crossed the channel; preëmpt a section of seat along the side wall by putting all my luggage there; and bribe a porter to place two chairs in a comfortable windless position on deck to which we could repair in case it should clear up on the way over. All of this I faithfully did. The chairs had the best possible position behind the deck-house and one of my pieces of luggage was left there as a guarantee that they belonged to me. It looked like rain when the train arrived, and we went below for a sandwich and a cup of coffee; but before the boat left it faired up somewhat and we sat on deck studying the harbor and the interesting company which was to cross with us. Some twenty English school-girls in charge of several severe-looking chaperones were crossing to Paris, either for a holiday, or, as Barfleur suggested, to renew their studies in a Paris school. A duller lot of maidens it would be hard to conceive, and yet some of them were not at all bad-looking. Conservatism and proper conduct were written all over them. Their clothing was severely plain, and their manners were most circumspect. None of that vivacity which characterizes the average American girl would have been tolerated under the circumstances. There was no undue giggling and little, if any, jesting. They interested me, because I instantly imagined twenty American girls of the same age in their place. They would have manifested twenty times the interest and enthusiasm, only in England that would have been the height of bad manners. As it was these English maidens sat in a quaint row all the way over, and disappeared quite conservatively into the train at Calais.