alism and a
hanging on their lips when they told us, that is when the gentlest of
mammas and the lovely daughter who was "out" did, of presentations at
the Tuileries to the then all-wonderful, the ineffable Empress: reports
touchingly qualified, on the part of our so exposed, yet after all so
scantily indurated relatives, by the question of whether occasions so
great didn't perhaps nevertheless profane the Sundays for which they
were usually appointed. There was something of an implication in the air
of those days, when young Americans were more numerously lovely than
now, or at least more wide-eyed, it would fairly appear, that some
account of the only tradition they had ever been rumoured to observe
(that of the Lord's day) might have been taken even at the Tuileries.

But what most comes back to me as the very note and fragrance of the New
York cousinship in this general connection is a time that I remember to
have glanced at on a page distinct from these, when the particular
cousins I now speak of had conceived, under the influence of I know not
what unextinguished morning star, the liveliest taste for the earliest
possible rambles and researches, in which they were so good as to allow
me, when I was otherwise allowed, to participate: health-giving walks,
of an extraordinarily _matinal_ character, at the hour of the meticulous
rag-pickers and exceptionally French polishers known to the Paris dawns
of the Second Empire as at no time since; which made us all feel
together, under the conduct of Honorine, bright child of the pavement
herself, as if _we_, in our fresh curiosity and admiration, had also
something to say to the great show presently to be opened, and were
free, throughout the place, as those are free of a house who know its
aspects of attic and cellar or how it looks from behind. I call our
shepherdess Honorine even though perhaps not infallibly naming the
sociable soubrette who might, with all her gay bold confidence, have
been an official inspectress in person, and to whose easy care or, more
particularly, expert sensibility and candour of sympathy and curiosity,
our flock was freely confided. If she wasn't Honorine she was Clementine
or Augustine--which is a trifle; since what I thus recover, in any case,
of these brushings of the strange Parisian dew, is those communities of
contemplation that made us most hang about the jewellers' windows in the
Palais Royal and the public playbills of the theatres on t