Some years ago, at the cozy little dining club held in my friend Madame Basque’s back-parlour, in the Rue de la Michodière, and the city of Paris, I had the advantage of the friendship of one of the most intelligent and humorous of the American gentlemen. There is such a personage—the vulgar, drawling, swearing, black-satin-vested, stove-pipe-hatted, whittling, smoking, expectorating, and dram-drinking Yankee loafers, who infest the Continent, notwithstanding; and a very excellent sample of the accomplished and unpretending gentleman was the American in question. He had paid a visit to England, in which country his sojourn had been of about three months’ duration; but he frankly confessed to me that having come purposely unprovided with those usually tiresome and worthless figments, letters of introduction—the very Dead-Sea apples of hospitality, goodly on the exterior, and all dust and ashes within—he had not, with the exception of his banker, who asked him to dinner once as a courteous acknowledgment of the ponderosity of his letter of credit, possessed one single acquaintance, male or female, during his stay in the metropolis of the world. I asked him whether he had not felt very lonely and miserable, and sufficiently inclined, at the end of the first week, to cast himself over any given bridge into the river Thames. Not in the slightest degree, he replied. I politely hinted that perhaps, as an American, he possessed the genial facility, common to his countrymen, of making himself at home wheresoever he went, and of forming agreeable travelling acquaintances, occasionally ripening into fast friends, by the simple process of saying “Fine day, stranger.” Not at all, he replied. He kept himself to himself, and indeed he was of a disposition, save in casual moments of unbending, quite surprising for its saturnine taciturnity. At all events, I urged, he could not have amused himself much by prowling about the streets, sleeping at hotels, dining in coffee-rooms, frequenting theatres and singing-rooms, and wandering in and out of museums; but I was wrong again, he said. He had seldom been so jolly in his life. I began to think either that he was quizzing me—“gumming” is the proper Transatlantic colloquialism, I think—or else that he was the Happy Man described in the Eastern apologue. But then, the Happy Man had, as it turned out, no shirt; and my American was remarkable for displaying a vast amount of fine linen, both at breast and wristbands, profusely decorated with studs, chains, and sleeve-buttons. How was it, then, I asked, giving the enigma up in sheer bewilderment. “Wall,” answered my friend with his own peculiar dry chuckle, “I used to ride about all day on the tops of the omnibuses; and very fine institutions for seeing life in a philosophical spirit, those omnibuses of yours are, sir.” He said Sir—not “Sirree,” as Anglo-Americans are ordinarily assumed to pronounce that title of courtesy.