mixed up
in some rather shady transactions in business, and put an end to himself
in that way.'--'Mrs. F----? Oh yes, I remember. An old thing, with a
grown-up son, who dresses as if she were fifteen. Dreadfully affected,
and _so_ silly! Moreover, Mrs. I---- lived in the same house with her in
Dresden--had the apartment above hers--and she told me the servants said
that Mrs. F---- was always in some difficulty with tradespeople.'--'Miss
G----? Is it possible you have never heard about her? Why, she ran away
with a footman, or something of the kind. Was brought back before she
had reached the station, I believe; but you can imagine the scandal! All
the girls in that family are rather queer, which, considering the stock
they come from, is really not very strange,' etc. etc. etc."

In view of these facts, and of many more of the same nature, when one
sees the people who come back from Europe after an absence of a year or
two unable to speak their own language fluently, because they have heard
and spoken nothing but German or French or Italian during that time, and
who cannot stand the climate because they are not used to it; when one
sees the young ladies who return home unable to take any interest in
American life, and who shut themselves away from its society, which to
them is most unpolished and vapid, because they have had a European
education; when one sees the hundred follies which a glimpse of Europe
will put into the heads of people whom before one had had every reason
to think sensible enough,--one feels inclined to ask one's self the
question, Are we to conclude that European life is demoralizing to
Americans? Are we to conclude that the innumerable advantages that such
a life confers--the wider view and broader knowledge of things, the
softening influences gained by contact with a riper civilization, the
aesthetic tastes developed by acquaintance with older and more perfect
art--are to count as nothing, are to be outweighed by the disadvantages
of the same life?

Certainly, out of a hundred Americans who go abroad ninety-nine return
with what they have lost in narrowness of experience completely offset
by what they have gained in pretentious affectation. So far from being
improved in any way are they that their well-wishers are inclined to
think it would have been far better had they never gone at all.

I do not wish to draw the ultimate conclusion from all this that it
would be better for Americans were their