By way of digression, an essential difference in point of view between English and Americans may here be noted. If an Englishman has reason to admire a tinker and make friends with him, he will leave his own respectable sphere and enter that of the tinker, and, in some humble haunt of tinkerdom, where he can remain incognito, will commune with his crony over pots of abominable and digestion-racking ale. The instinct of the American, in sworn brotherhood with a tinker, is, on the other hand, to lift the tinker to his own habitation of delight. He will desire to take him into a saloon which he himself frequents, fill him up with champagne and provide him with the best, biggest and strongest cigar that money can buy. In both cases appear the special defects of national qualities. The Englishman goes to the tinker’s boozing ken (thereby, incidentally, putting the tinker at his ease) because he would be ashamed of being seen by any of his own clan in a tinker’s company. The American does not care a hang for being seen with the tinker; he wants to give his friend a good time; but, incidentally, he has no intuitive regard for the tinker’s feelings, predilections and timidities. From which disquisition it may be understood how Lucilla played Lady Bountiful without the slightest consciousness of doing so. She played it so well, with regard to Félise, as to make that young woman in the course of a day or two her slave and worshipper. She shewed her the sights of Paris, Versailles, the Galeries de Lafayette, the Tomb of Napoleon, Poiret’s, the Salon d’Hiver, the Panthéon and Cartier’s in the Rue de la Paix. With the aid of pins and scissors and Céleste, she also attired her in an evening frock and under the nominal protection of an agreeable young compatriot from the Embassy took her to dine at the Café de Paris and then to the Théâtre du Gymnase. A great, soft-cushioned, smooth, noiseless car carried them luxuriously through the infinite streets; and when they were at home it seemed to await them night and day by the kerb of the Boulevard Saint Germain. Lucilla set the head of the little country mouse awhirl with sensations. Félise revered her as a goddess, and whispered in awe the Christian name which she was commanded to use. * * * * * A breathless damsel, with a jumble of conflicting scraps of terror and delight instead of a mind, her arms full of an adored Persian kitten and an adoring Pekinese spaniel, after a couple of days’ flashing course through France, was brought in the gathering dusk, with a triumphant sweep up the hill, to the familiar front door of the Hôtel des Grottes. Baptiste, green-aproned, gaped as he saw her, and, scuttling indoors, shouted at the top of his voice: “_Monsieur, monsieur, c’est mademoiselle!_”