AN AMERICAN GIRL AND HER LOVERS.

In the spring of 1869 I was induced, for the sake of rest and recreation, to take charge of a young American girl during a tour in Europe.  This young girl was Miss Helen St. Clair of Detroit, Michigan.  We two were by no means strangers.  She had been my pupil since the time when she was the prettiest little creature that ever wore a scarlet hood.  I have a little picture, scarlet hood and all, that I would not exchange for the most beautiful one that Greuze ever painted.  Not that her face bore any resemblance to the pictures of Greuze.  It had neither the sweet simplicity of the girl in “The Broken Pitcher,” nor the sentimental graces which he bestows on his court beauties.  It was an exceedingly piquant, animated face, never at rest, always kindling, flashing, gleaming, whether with sunlight or lightning.  Her movements were quick and darting, like those of a humming-bird.  Her enunciation, though perfectly distinct, was marvelously rapid.  The same quickness characterized her mental operations.  Her conclusions, right or wrong, were always instantaneous.  Her prompt decisiveness, her talent for mimicry and her witchery of grace and beauty won her a devoted following of school-girls, to whom her tastes and opinions were as authoritative as ever were those of Eugenie to the ladies of her court.  School-girls, like college-boys, are very apt in nicknames, and Helen’s was the “Little Princess,” which her pretty, imperious ways made peculiarly appropriate.

I do not know how her parents dared trust her to me for a year beyond the sea, but they did.  We set off in high enthusiasm, and Helen was full of mirth and laughter till we were fairly on board the steamer in New York harbor, when she threw herself on her father’s breast with a gesture of utter abandonment that would have made the fortune of a debutante on any stage in the world.  It was so unlooked-for that we all broke down, and Mr. St. Clair was strongly inclined to take her home with him.  But so sudden was she in all her moods that his foot had scarcely touched the shore before she was again radiant with anticipation.

I will not linger on the pleasant summer travel, the Rhine majesty, the Alpine glory.  September saw us established in the city of cities—­Paris.  Everywhere we had met throngs of Americans.  Neighbors from over the way in our own city greeted us warmly in most unexpected places.  But we had not crossed the ocean merely to see our own countrymen.  In Paris we were determined to eschew hotels and pensions and to become the inmates of a French home.  Everybody told us this would be impossible, but I find nothing so stimulating as the assertion that a thing can’t be done.  Two weeks of eager inquiry, and we were received into a family which could not have been more to our wish if it had been created expressly for us.  It was that of Monsieur Le Fort, a professor in the Medical College, a handsome elderly man with the bit of red ribbon coveted by Frenchmen in his buttonhole.  Madame Le Fort, a charming, graceful woman midway between thirty and forty, and a pretty daughter of seventeen, completed the family.  With great satisfaction we took possession of the pretty rooms, all white and gold, that overlooked the Rond Point des Champs Elysees.