But the American goes to Paris as though returning to his inheritance and to his own people. He approaches it with the friendly confidence of a child. Its language holds no terrors for him; and he feels himself fully equipped if he can ask for his "edition," and say, "Cocher, allez Henry's tout sweet." There is nothing so joyous and confiding as the American during his first visit to the French metropolis. He has been told by older men of the gay, glad days of the Second Empire, and by his college chum of the summer of the last exposition, and he enters Paris determined to see all that any one else has ever seen, and to outdo all that any one else has ever done, and to stir that city to its suburbs. He saves his time, his money, and his superfluous energy for this visit, and the most amusing part of it is that he always leaves Paris fully assured that he has enjoyed himself while there more thoroughly than any one else has ever done, and that the city will require two or three months' rest before it can readjust itself after the shock and wonder due to his meteoric flight through its limits. London he dismisses in a week as a place in which you can get good clothes at moderate prices, and which supports some very entertaining music-halls; but Paris, he tells you, ecstatically, when he meets you on the boulevards or at the banker's, where he is drawing grandly on his letter of credit, is "the greatest place on earth," and he adds, as evidence of the truth of this, that he has not slept in three weeks. He is unsurpassed in his omnivorous capacity for sight-seeing, and in his ability to make himself immediately and contentedly at home. There is a story which illustrates this that is told by a young American banker who has been living in Paris for the last six years. He met one day on the boulevards an old college friend of his, and welcomed him with pleasure. "You must let me be your guide," the banker said. "I have been here so long now that I know just what you ought to see, and I shall enjoy seeing it with you as much as though it were for the first time. When did you come?" The new arrival had reached Paris only three days before, and said that he was ready to see all that it had to show. "You have nothing to do to-night, then?" asked the banker. "Well, we will drop in at the gardens and the cafés chantants. There is nothing like them anywhere." His friend said he had made the tour of the gardens on the night of his arrival, but that he would be glad to revisit them. But that being the case, the banker would rather take him to the cafés--"The Black Cat," and Bruant's, and "The Dead Rat." These his friend had visited on his second evening. "Oh, well, we can cross the river, then, and I will show you some slumming," said the banker. "You should see the places where the thieves go--the Château Rouge and Père Lunette." "I went there last night," said the new-comer.