And then the children—­babies, I should say if I were speaking of English bairns of their age; but seeing that they are Americans, I hardly dare to call them children.  The actual age of these perfectly-civilized and highly-educated beings may be from three to four.  One will often see five or six such seated at the long dinner-table of the hotel, breakfasting and dining with their elders, and going through the ceremony with all the gravity, and more than all the decorum, of their grandfathers.  When I was three years old I had not yet, as I imagine, been promoted beyond a silver spoon of my own wherewith to eat my bread and milk in the nursery; and I feel assured that I was under the immediate care of a nursemaid, as I gobbled up my minced mutton mixed with potatoes and gravy.  But at hotel life in the States the adult infant lisps to the waiter for everything at table, handles his fish with epicurean delicacy, is choice in his selection of pickles, very particular that his beef-steak at breakfast shall be hot, and is instant in his demand for fresh ice in his water.  But perhaps his, or in this case her, retreat from the room when the meal is over, is the chef-d’oeuvre of the whole performance.  The little, precocious, full-blown beauty of four signifies that she has completed her meal—­or is “through” her dinner, as she would express it—­by carefully extricating herself from the napkin which has been tucked around her.  Then the waiter, ever attentive to her movements, draws back the chair on which she is seated, and the young lady glides to the floor.  A little girl in Old England would scramble down, but little girls in New England never scramble.  Her father and mother, who are no more than her chief ministers, walk before her out of the saloon, and then she—­swims after them.  But swimming is not the proper word.  Fishes, in making their way through the water, assist, or rather impede, their motion with no dorsal wriggle.  No animal taught to move directly by its Creator adopts a gait so useless, and at the same time so graceless.  Many women, having received their lessons in walking from a less eligible instructor, do move in this way, and such women this unfortunate little lady has been instructed to copy.  The peculiar step to which I allude is to be seen often on the boulevards in Paris.  It is to be seen more often in second-rate French towns, and among fourth-rate French women.  Of all signs in women betokening vulgarity, bad taste, and aptitude to bad morals, it is the surest.  And this is the gait of going which American mothers—­ some American mothers I should say—­love to teach their daughters!  As a comedy at a hotel it is very delightful, but in private life I should object to it.