You wonder if it never occurs to them to walk along the banks of the Seine and look over the side at the people unloading canal-boats, or clipping poodles, or watering cavalry horses, or patiently fishing; if they never pull over the books in the stalls that line the quays, or just loiter in abject laziness, with their arms on the parapet of a bridge, with the sun on their backs, and the steamboats darting to and fro beneath them, and with the towers of Notre Dame before and the grim prison of the Conciergerie on one side. Surely this is a better employment than taking tea to the music of a Hungarian band while your young friends from Beverly Farms and Rockaway knock a polo-ball around a ten-acre lot. I met two American women hurrying along the Rue de Rivoli one morning last summer who told me that they had just arrived in Paris that moment, and were about to leave two hours later for Havre to take the steamer home. "So," explained the elder, "as we have so much time, we are just running down to the Louvre to take a farewell look at 'Mona Lisa' and the 'Winged Victory;' we won't see them again for a year, perhaps." Their conduct struck me as interesting when compared with that of about four hundred other American girls, who never see anything of Paris during their four weeks' stay there each summer, because so much of their time is taken up at the dress-makers'. It is pathetic to see them come back to the hotel at five, tired out and cross, with having had to stand on their feet four hours at a time while some mysterious ceremony was going forward. It is hard on them when the sun is shining out-of-doors and there are beautiful drives and great art galleries and quaint old chapels and curious museums and ancient gardens lying free and open all around them, that they should be compelled to spend four weeks in this fashion. There was a young woman of this class of American visitors to Paris who had just arrived there on her way from Rome, and who was telling us how much she had delighted in the galleries there. She was complaining that she had no more pictures to enjoy. Some one asked her what objection she had to the Louvre or the Luxembourg. "Oh, none at all," she said; "but I saw those pictures last year." These are the Americans who go to Paris for the spring and summer only, who live in hotels, and see little of the city beyond the Rue de la Paix and the Avenue of the Champs Élysées and their bankers'. They get a great deal of pleasure out of their visit, however, and they learn how important a thing it is to speak French correctly. If they derive no other benefit from their visit they are sufficiently justified, and when we contrast them with other Americans who have made Paris their chosen home, they almost shine as public benefactors in comparison.