ure now to recall the circumstance.

I could well understand why Miss Canbee felt constrained to obtain
permission to spend the afternoon in converse with her cousins in
preference to joining the rest of us in a long walk in the warm, bright
sunshine along the quays of the River Seine, this being an excursion I
had planned at luncheon; but why--as I repeatedly asked myself--why
should Miss Hilda Slicker manifest pique to a marked degree when I
insisted on her accompanying us? She, surely, could feel no personal
interest in two young French officers whose acquaintance she had just
formed and who were in no degree related to her by ties of
blood-kinship.

Such happenings as the two I have just narrated went far to convince me
that even the refining and elevating influences of foreign travel, when
prosecuted under the most agreeable and congenial of auspices, might not
suffice in all instances to curb the naturally frivolous and unheeding
tendencies of growing young persons of the opposite sex, between the
given ages of seventeen and twenty.

I may also state that the task of mastering the idiomatic eccentricities
of the French language gave me some small inconvenience. With Greek,
with Latin, with Hebrew, I am on terms of more or less familiarity; but
until this present occasion the use of modern tongues other than our own
have never impressed me as an accomplishment worthy to be undertaken by
one who is busied with the more serious acquirements of learning.
However, some days before sailing I had secured a work entitled "French
in Thirty Lessons," the author being our teacher of modern languages at
Fernbridge, Miss McGillicuddy by name, and at spare intervals had
diligently applied myself to its contents.

On reaching France, however, I found the jargon or patois spoken
generally by the natives to differ so materially from the purer forms as
set forth in this work that perforce I had recourse to a small manual
containing, in parallel columns, sentences in English and their Gallic
equivalents, and thereafter never ventured abroad without carrying this
volume in my pocket. Even so, no matter how careful my enunciation, I
frequently encountered difficulty in making my intent clear to the
understanding of the ordinary gendarme or cab driver, or what not. Nor
will I deny that in other essential regards Paris was to me
disappointing. The life pursued by many of the inhabitants after
nightfall impressed me as frivolous in t