On this occasion my cabman, for no reason whatever, suddenly began to beat his horse in the hatefulest way, leaning down with his whip and striking the horse underneath, as we were going downhill on the Rue de Freycinet.  I screamed at him, but he pretended not to hear.  The cab rocked from side to side, the horse was galloping, and this brute beating him like a madman.  It made me wild.  I was being bounced around like corn in a popper and in imminent danger of being thrown to the pavement.

People saw my danger, but nobody did anything—­just looked, that was all.  I saw that I must save myself if there was any saving going to be done.  So with one last trial of my lungs I shrieked at the cabman, but the cobblestones were his excuse, and he kept on.  So I just stood up and knocked his hat off with my parasol!—­his big, white, glazed hat.  It was glorious!  He turned around in a fury and pulled up his horse, with a torrent of French abuse and impudence which scared me nearly to death.  I thought he might strike me.

So I pulled my twitching lips into a distortion which passed muster with a Paris cabman for a smile, and begged his pardon so profusely that he relented and didn’t kill me.

I often blush for the cheap Americans with loud voices and provincial speech, and general commonness, whom one meets over here; but with all their faults they cannot approach the vulgarities at table which I have seen in Paris.  In all America we have no such vulgar institution as their rince-bouche—­an affair resembling a two-part finger-bowl, with the water in a cup in the middle.  At fashionable tables, men and women in gorgeous clothes, who speak four or five languages, actually rinse their mouths and gargle at the table, and then slop the water thus used back into these bowls.  The first time I saw this I do assure you I would not have been more astonished if the next course had been stomach pumps.

And as for the toothpick habit!  Let no one ever tell me that that atrocity is American!  Here it goes with every course, and without the pretended decency of holding one’s serviette before one’s mouth, which, in my opinion, is a mere affectation, and aggravates the offence.

But the most shameless thing in all Europe is the marriage question.  To talk with intelligent, clever, thinking men and women, who know the secret history of all the famous international marriages, as well as the high contracting parties, who will relate the price paid for the husband, and who the intermediary was, and how much commission he or she received, is to make you turn faint and sick at the mere thought, especially if you happen to come from a country where they once fought to abolish the buying and selling of human beings.  But our black slaves were above buying and selling themselves or their children.  It remains for civilized Europe of our time to do this, and the highest and proudest of her people at that.