When the New York party has cashed its cheque at the American bank--which is quite a rendezvous for trans-Atlantics and at which all the American newspapers can be seen--the feminine element hastens to visit all the most fashionable shops. The ladies are eager to purchase, at comparatively low prices, those Parisian costumes which their own native custom-house raises to prices so exorbitant. Dressed ere long in the richest and newest fashions, they step with their male companions into a carriage and drive to the Bois de Boulogne; then they go to the opera, to spectacles of every kind, and to the Legation. If there happens to be a sovereign on the throne, they put their names down for presentation at the Tuileries and order a court costume. For it must be confessed that the Americans are fond of the pomps of this world, and that, Republicans as they profess to be, they have no prejudice against kings and princes outside their own country. The monarchs of other nations neither shock nor terrify them. And the American tourist, apart from the question of political sentiment, likes to see everything and do everything before he recrosses the Atlantic. If an American family visits a land where it is the fashion to be presented at court, they will feel humiliated and ashamed should they have to confess afterwards to their compatriots that they missed the presentation. Under the last Empire the American visitors to Paris showed an eagerness for court-presentations which would have entitled them to a place in Thackeray’s Book of Snobs--which, nevertheless, directly or indirectly, embraces pretty nearly the whole human species. But there were a certain number of Americans then in France who got acclimatised to the splendours of the court and became habitual guests at imperial residences. The drawing-room of the United States minister is naturally the centre of meeting for American society in Paris. “The aspect and tone of these assemblies,” says a French writer, “is at once less solemn and colder than our French social gatherings. The necessity of being previously presented exists in this democratic society just as it does in England, though on the other hand American conversation and behaviour bear a natural impress of indifference and freedom, not even to the exclusion, perhaps, of a little coarseness.”