An excursion numbering several hundreds, gathered along the river towns by the benevolent enterprise of railway officials, came up to the mountain one day.  The officials seemed to have run a drag-net through factories, workshops, Sunday-schools, and churches, and scooped in the weary workers at homes and in shops unaccustomed to a holiday.  Our friends formed a part of a group on the hotel piazza who watched the straggling arrival of this band of pleasure.  For by this time our two friends had found a circle of acquaintances, with the facility of watering-place life, which in its way represented certain phases of American life as well as the excursion.  A great many writers have sought to classify and label and put into a paragraph a description of the American girl.  She is not to be disposed of by any such easy process.  Undoubtedly she has some common marks of nationality that distinguish her from the English girl, but in variety she is practically infinite, and likely to assume almost any form, and the characteristics of a dozen nationalities.  No one type represents her.  What, indeed, would one say of this little group on the hotel piazza, making its comments upon the excursionists?  Here is a young lady of, say, twenty-three years, inclining already to stoutness, domestic, placid, with matron written on every line of her unselfish face, capable of being, if necessity were, a notable housekeeper, learned in preserves and jellies and cordials, sure to have her closets in order, and a place for every remnant, piece of twine, and all odds and ends.  Not a person to read Browning with, but to call on if one needed a nurse, or a good dinner, or a charitable deed.  Beside her, in an invalid’s chair, a young girl, scarcely eighteen, of quite another sort, pale, slight, delicate, with a lovely face and large sentimental eyes, all nerves, the product, perhaps, of a fashionable school, who in one season in New York, her first, had utterly broken down into what is called nervous prostration.  In striking contrast was Miss Nettie Sumner, perhaps twenty-one, who corresponded more nearly to what the internationalists call the American type; had evidently taken school education as a duck takes water, and danced along in society into apparent robustness of person and knowledge of the world.  A handsome girl, she would be a comely woman, good-natured, quick at repartee, confining her knowledge of books to popular novels, too natural and frank to be a flirt, an adept in all the nice slang current in fashionable life, caught up from collegians and brokers, accustomed to meet men in public life, in hotels, a very “jolly” companion, with a fund of good sense that made her entirely capable of managing her own affairs.  Mr. King was at the moment conversing with still another young lady, who had more years than the last-named-short, compact figure, round girlish face, good, strong, dark eyes, modest in bearing, self-possessed in manner, sensible-who made ready and incisive comments, and