no one
can understand. One evening, after entertaining him for about an hour,
she walked with him the whole length of the room, not noticing any one,
though every eye was upon her. He sat down at the piano which stood in a
corner, struck a few chords, and then, with no coaxing whatever, she
sang; and such a song! Her gray eyes grew dark, and her voice quivered,
deepened, expanded into a melody that made you think the heavens had
suddenly opened. Every other sound ceased; the doors and windows were
filled with eager faces; the dancers ended in the middle of a quadrille,
and the band came in a body to listen. I saw one fat Dutchman holding
his fiddle in one hand while he wiped the tears from his eyes with the
other. When the song was ended the old Italian took both her hands in
his and kissed them, talking at the same time with impossible rapidity;
and she smiled and looked as happy as if she had won a prize, turning
her back on every one else who wished to congratulate her. It showed how
very odd she was. The next evening _I_ asked her to sing, and she
flatly refused without the least excuse, saying, "No: a refusal will be
a pleasant novelty in your life, Mr. Highrank."

ITA ANIOL PROKOP.

[TO BE CONTINUED]

THE STRANGER WITHIN THE GATES OF PARIS.

"Paris," once said Victor Hugo to me, "is the hostess of all the
nations. There all the world is at home. It is the second best place
with all foreigners--the fatherland first, and afterward Paris."

There was a great deal of truth in the observation, and especially is it
true as regards Americans. By our natural sociability and versatility of
temperament, by our love of all bright and pleasant surroundings, by our
taste for pleasure and amusement, we assimilate more closely in our
superficial characteristics to the French nation than we do to any
other. Our Britannic cousins are too cold, too unsociable, too heavy for
our fraternization, and mighty barriers of dissimilarity of language, of
tastes, of customs and manners divide us from the European nation which
of all others we most closely resemble in essential particulars--namely,
the Northern Germans. The Prussians have been called--and that, too,
with a good deal of truth--the Yankees of Europe; and if the term
"Yankees" means, as it usually does in European parlance, the entire
population of the United States, we citizens of the great republic have
every right to feel proud of the comparison. Yet, with a