It is but rarely that we find a German, a Frenchman, a Spaniard, an Italian, or a Russian, who even having expatriated himself completely for one reason or another, and after years of absence, will not have retained some affection for his native country, some longing for it, some feeling that it is the best place on earth after all. But among any number of Americans who have been on European soil for any period of time, from twenty days to twenty years, those who are burdened with any such affection, any such longing, any such feeling, might be counted with ease. Indeed, if through some inconceivable arrangement of human affairs the Americans abroad were to be prevented from ever returning to their own country, I imagine the majority would bear the catastrophe with great equanimity, and, aside from the natural ties of family and pecuniary interests that might bind them to their home, would think the permanent life in Europe thus enforced the happiest that Fate could have bestowed upon them. For my part, I never met but one American who was anxious to return home--a lady, strange to say--and her chief reason seemed to be that she missed her pancakes, hot breads, etc. for breakfast. All the others, men and women, had but one voice to express how immeasurably more to their taste was everything in Europe--the climate, the life, the people, the country, the food, the manners, the institutions, the customs--than anything in America. However, all Americans in Europe are not of this class, although it includes the majority. There is a comparatively small number who are as much impressed with the perfection of everything American as the most ardent patriotism could desire. These people go to Europe cased in a triple armor of self-assertion, prepared to poohpooh everything and everybody that may come under their notice, and above all to vindicate under all circumstances their independence as free-born American citizens by giving the world around them the benefit of their opinions upon all topics both in and out of season. They stand before a _chef-d'oeuvre_ of some old master and declare in a loud, aggressive voice that they see nothing whatever to admire in it, that the bystanders may know that the judgment of centuries will not weigh with _them_. They inquire with grim facetiousness, and terrific emphasis on the pronominal adjectives, "Is _this_ what the people in this part of the world call a steamboat?" "Do they call that duckpond a lake?" "Is that stream what they call a river?" And so on, in a perpetual attitude of protest against everything not so large as their steamboats, their lakes, their rivers. When this genus of Americans abroad comes together with the other genus--with the people who think the most wretched daub that hangs in the most obscure corner of a European gallery, labelled with prudent indefiniteness "of the school of ----," better far than the most conscientious work by the most gifted of American artists--and a