Thirty-three years ago--that is, shortly before Christmas, 1847--I went over to Paris to pass a few weeks with my family. The great railway schemes of the two previous years in England had broken down a good many men in our office--draughtsmen, surveyors and so on. I wonder if the present public recollects those days, when the _Times_ brought out double supplements to accommodate the advertisements of railroads, when King Hudson was as much a potentate as Queen Victoria, when Brunel and Stephenson were autocrats, and when everybody saw a sudden chance of getting rich by shares or damages? Those days were the beginning of that period of prosperity of which the recent "hard times" were the reaction. _Then_ twenty guineas a night for office-work was sometimes paid to youngsters not yet out of their teens. In the great offices the young men worked all day and the alternate nights to get plans ready for Parliament, sustained by strong coffee always on the tap, till some of them went mad with the excitement and the strain.
I had worked hard both in the field and office during the closing months of 1847, but I broke down at last, and was sent to recover my health under the care of my family. That family consisted of my father--a half-pay English officer--my mother and three sisters, then living _au troisième_ in the Rue Neuve de Berri, not far from the newly-erected Russian church, and the windows of the _appartement_ commanded a side view down the Champs Élysées. 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 _soupçon_ of wild flavor which gives them individuality. They are to society what their own wild turkeys and canvasbacks are to the _menu_.
