a side view down the Champs Elysees.  I only needed rest and recreation, both of which my adoring family eagerly provided me.  My sisters were three lively, simple-hearted, honest English girls, who had a large acquaintance in Paris, and took great pride and pleasure in introducing to it their only brother.  We were not only invited to our embassy and on visiting terms with all the English Colony (that colony whose annals at that period are written in The Adventures of Philip, and to which Thackeray’s mother and nearest relatives, like ourselves, belonged), but we were, in virtue of some American connections, admitted to the American embassy on the footing of semi-Americans.

We enjoyed our American friends greatly.  I formed the opinion then, which I retain now, that cultivated Americans, the top-skimming of the social cream, are some of the most charming people to be met with in cultivated society.  To all that constitutes “nice people” everywhere they join a soupcon of wild flavor which gives them individuality.  They are to society what their own wild turkeys and canvasbacks are to the menu.

One of my sisters, Amy, the eldest, had been ill that winter, and was not equal to joining in the gayeties that the others enjoyed.  Her principal amusement was walking in the Gardens of Monceaux, a private domain of King Louis Philippe in the Batignolles, a quiet, humdrum spot, where she could set her foot upon green turf and gravel.  The streets of Paris, the Boulevards, and the Champs Elysees were too attractive to a pleasure-seeker like myself to allow me to content myself with the pale attractions of Monceaux, but I went there with my sister once or twice, because French etiquette forbade her walking even in these quiet garden-paths alone.

One day it was proposed by her that we should go again.  I could not, in common humanity, refuse, and so consented.  Poor Amy “put on her things,” as our girls called it, and we descended to the porte-cochere, intending to engage the first passing citadine.  As we stepped into the street, however, a gay carriage with high-stepping gray horses, a chasseur with knife and feathers, and a coachman in a modest livery on a hammer-cloth resplendent with yellow fringes and embroideries, drew up at our door:  a pretty hand was laid upon the portiere and a voice cried, “Amy!  Amy!  I was coming for you.”

“My brother—­Miss Leare,” said Amy.

Miss Leare bowed to me gracefully and motioned to her chasseur to open the carriage-door.  “Get in,” she said. “I have the carriage for two hours:  what shall we do with it?  Mamma is at the dentist’s.—­Amy, I thought you would enjoy a drive, and so I came for you.”

I helped Amy in, and was making my bow when Miss Leare stopped me.  “Come too,” she said cordially:  “Amy’s brother surely need not be taboo.  Shall we drive to the Bois?”

“I was going to Monceaux,” said Amy.  “Would it be quite the thing for us to drive alone to the Bois?”