Sometimes she would be invisible for two or three days together:  no one would see her, either at meals or at the evening ball.  When asked what she had been doing, she would smile that sweet smile of hers and say she had been enjoying herself.  She was very talented, but not a bit ostentatious.  To give you an example:  It was rumored that she had a wonderful voice, and though we had been begging her to sing for at least a month, she steadily refused to gratify us.  One day there was a queer old Italian chap came to The Brook for his health.  He looked like an organ-grinder, and had been once actually on the stage.  Well, do you know she allowed him to be introduced to her, and talked to him with as much deference as if he had been a prince, when she ought not have spoken to him at all, you know; and in that gibberish, too, that 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