"Oh, yes, of course!" was the answer. "The tide was high, and we went right up." The poor woman had probably been aground, some time, on the Hudson Overslaugh or the Shrewsbury Flats, and supposed that nothing but low tide could prevent going up to Paris by steamship. "Let me see--what is the name of that river that takes you up to Paris?" the scamp went on, with his face contorted into a wonderful appearance of earnest thought. "The--the--the--which is it, now, the Danube or the Amazon?" "I am not very sure," answered the lady at hap-hazard, "I almost forget, but I think it is the Amazon--yes, I know it must be the Amazon." At about that period there was a laugh in the back part of the long wagon, and Clara Vanderlyn was as red in the face as if she had been committing some serious fault. She would unquestionably have liked to pinch that naughty fellow's ears, if not to box them. But the laugh did not disturb Mrs. Brooks Cunninghame, for the young people were frolicking all the while and a hundred laughs might break out without one of them being directed at _her_. Halstead Rowan had kept his own face perfectly serene so far, but he evidently began to feel twitchings around the mouth which might give him trouble directly, and, for fear of the worst, he fired his concluding shots with great rapidity. "You were in London, of course?" he asked. "Yes, a good while; we took a house there, and seen the Queen, and the Crystal Palace--" "Let me see--the Queen lives in the Crystal Palace, doesn't she?" "Of course she does!" answered the traveller, who remembered just so much as that queens and palaces belonged together, and no more. More laughing at the back of the wagon, a little choking, and some stuffing of cambric handkerchiefs into mouths pretty or the reverse. No irreparable explosion as yet, though that catastrophe could not possibly be long deferred. "Yes--you were in London: did you go up the Pyramids?" "No, we went to 'em, but not up 'em." "But you went up the Alps, of course?--everybody goes up the Alps." "Of course we did!" and the lady really bridled. "Think we would go so far as that and spend so much money, and not go up that there?" The explosion was impending--there was already a rumbling in the distance, which should have been heeded. "How did you go up--in _what_ kind of a vessel did you say, madam?" It is to be presumed that by this time the lady was considerably confused even in the smattering of information from the guide-book, with which she had commenced; and she could not have had any moral doubt remaining that the Alps was a river; for she answered, without one symptom of consciousness in her countenance: "We went up in a steamboat, and a nasty little thing it was!"