 CHAPTER XI. Dressed to Kill, Part II. Be that as it may, pheasant shooting is the last word in the English sporting calendar. It is a sport strictly for the gentry. Except in the capacity of innocent bystanders, the lower orders do not share in it. It is much too good for them, besides they could not maintain the correct wardrobe for it. The classes derived one substantial benefit from the institution, however. The sporting instinct of the landed Englishman has led to the enactment of laws under which an ordinary person goes smack to jail if he has caught sequestering a clandestine pheasant bird. But it does not militate against the landowners peddling off his game after he has destroyed it. British thrift comes in here. And so, in carload lots, it is sold to the marketmen. The result is that, in the fall of the year, pheasants are cheaper than chickens, and any person who can afford poultry on his dinner table can afford pheasants. The continental hunter makes an even more spectacular appearance than his British brother. No self-respecting German or French sportsman would think of fairing forth after the incarnate brown hair, or the ferocious wood pigeon, unless he had on a green hat with a feather in it and a green suit to match the hat, and swung about his neck with a cord a natty firm muff to keep his hands in between shots, and a swivel chair to sit in while waiting for the wild boar to come along and be bowled over. Being hunted with a swivel chair is what makes the German wild boar wild. On occasion, also, the hunter wears, suspended from his belt, a cute little hanger like a sawed-off saber, with which to cut the throats of his spoil. Then when it has spoiled some more, they will serve it at a French restaurant. It was our fortune to be in France on the famous and ever memorable occasion when the official stag of the French Republic met a tragic and untimely end. Under circumstances acutely distressing to all who believe in the dignity bestowed prerogatives of the nobility. The Paris edition of the Herald printed the lamentable tale on its front page, and I clipped the account. I offer it here in exact reproduction, including the headline. Hunting Incidents Said to Be Due to Conspiracy Further details are given in this morning's figure-o of the incident between Prince Marat and Monsieur Dachis, the mayor of Saint-Felix, near Clermont, which was briefly reported in yesterday's Herald. A regular conspiracy was organized by Monsieur Dachis, it is alleged, in order to secure the stag, Prince Marat and Comte de Vallant were hunting in the forest of La Nouvelle-En-Hance. Already at the outset of the hunt, Monsieur Dachis, according to La Figaro, charged at a huntsman with a little automobile in which he was driving and threatened to fire. Then when the stag ran into the wood near the Terai River, one of his keepers shot it. In great haste the animal was loaded on another automobile, and before either the prince or the Comte de Vallant could interfere it was driven away. While Comte de Vallant spurred his horse in pursuit, Prince Marat disarmed the man who had shot the stag, for he was leveling his gun at another huntsman. But before the gun was wrenched from his hands he had struck Prince Desling, Prince Marat's uncle, across the face with the butt. Meantime Comte de Vallant had overtaken the automobile and, though threatened with revolvers by its occupants, would have recaptured the stag if the men in charge of it had not taken it into the house of Monsieur Dachis' father. The only course left for Prince Marat and Comte de Vallant was to lodge a complaint with the police for assault and for killing the stag, which Monsieur Dachis refused to give back. From this you may see how very much more exciting stag-hunting is in France than in America, comparing the two systems we find but one point of resemblance, namely the attempted shooting of a huntsman. In the Northwoods we do a good deal of that sort of thing, however with us it is not yet customary to charge the prospective victim in a little automobile. That may come in time. Our best bags are made by the stalking or still-hunting method. Our city-raised sportsman slips up on his guide and pots him from arrest. But consider the rest of the description so graphically set forth by Le Figaro, the intriguing of the mayor, the opposing groups rampaging around, some on horseback and some in automobile runabouts, the intense disappointment of the high-born Prince Marat and his uncle, the Prince Desling, and his friend, the Comte de Valon, the implied grief of the stag at being stricken down by other than noble hands, the action of the base-born commoner who shot the stag in striking the Prince Desling across his pained and aristocratic face with the butt, exact type of butt and name of owner not being given. Only in its failure to clear up this important point, and in omitting to give descriptions of the costumes worn by the two princes and the Comte, is Le Figaro's story lacking. They must have been wearing the very latest creations, too. This last brings me back again to the subject of clothes, and serves to remind me that, contrary to a belief prevalent on this side of the water, good clothes cost as much abroad as they cost here. In England a man may buy gloves and certain substantial articles of haberdashery and silk and linen and wool at a much lower figure than in America, and in Italy he will find crocheted handbags and bead necklaces are to be had cheaper than at home, provided, of course, he cares for such things as crocheted handbags and bead necklaces. Handmade laces and embroideries and sundry other feminine fripperies, so women tell me, are moderately priced on the continent, if so be the tourist purchaser steers clear of the more fashionable shops and chases the elusive bargain down in a back street. But quality considered, other things cost as much in Europe as they cost here, and frequently they cost more. If you buy at the shopkeeper's first price he has a secret contempt for you. If you haggle him down to a reasonably fair valuation, say about twice the amount a native would pay for the same thing, he has a half concealed contempt for you. If you refuse to trade at all he has an open contempt for you, and in any event he dislikes you because you are an American. So there you are, no matter how the transaction turns out you have his contempt. It is the only thing he parts with at cost. It is true that you may buy a suit of clothes for ten dollars in London, so also you may buy a suit of clothes for ten dollars in any American city, but the reasonably affluent American doesn't buy ten dollars suits at home. He saves himself up to indulge in that form of idiocy abroad. In Paris or Rome you may get a five course dinner with wine for forty cents, so you may get in certain quarters of New York, but in either place the man who can afford to pay more for his dinner will find it to his ultimate well being to do so. Simply because a boarding house in France or Italy is known as a pension doesn't keep it from being a boarding house, and a pretty average bad one as I have been informed by misguided Americans who tried living at a pension and afterwards put in a good deal of their spare time regretting it. Altogether, looking back on my own experiences, I can at this time of writing think of but two common commodities which, when grade is taken into the equation, are found to be radically cheaper in Europe than in America. These two things being taxicabs and counts. For their cleanliness and smartness of aspect and their reasonableness of meter fare, taxicabs all over Europe are a constant joy to the traveling American. And though in the United States counts are so costly that only the marriageable daughters of the very wealthy may afford to buy them, and even then, as the count calendars attest, have the utmost difficulty in keeping them after they are bought. In continental Europe anywhere one may, for a moderate price, hire a true-born count to do almost any small job, from guiding one through an art gallery to waiting on one at table. Counts make in different guides, but are middling fair waiters. Outside of the counts and the taxicabs and the food in Germany, I found in all Europe just one real overpowering bargain. And that was in Naples, where, as a general thing, bargains are not what they seem. For the exceedingly moderate outlay of one lira, Italian, or twenty cents American, I secured this combination to wit as follows. In the background, old Vesuvius, like a wicked fallen angel, wearing his plume, fume, halo of sulfurous hell-smoke, in the middle distance the bay of Naples, each larcenous wave-crest in it triple-plated with silver and glory pilfered from a splendid moon. On the left the riding-lights of a visiting squadron of American warships. On the right the myriad slanted sails of the coral-fisher's boats, beating out toward Capri, with the curle-u-culls of the fishermen floating back in shrill snatches to meet a jangle of bell and bugle from the fleet. In the immediate foreground, a competent and accomplished family troop of six Neapolitan troubadours, men, women, and children, some of them playing guitars, and all six of them with fine mellow voices and tremendous dramatic effect, singing, the words being Italian but the air good American, John Brown's body lies a moldering in the grave. I defy you to get more than that for twenty cents anywhere in the world. CHAPTER XII. NIGHT LIFE WITH THE LIFE PART MISSING. In our consideration of this topic we first come to the night life of the English. They have none. Moving along to the next subject under the same heading, which is the night life of Paris, we find here so much night life of such a delightfully transparent and counterfeit character, so much made to measure devilry, so many members of the Mad Caps Union engaged on piecework, so much delicious, hoidinish, daring do, all carefully stage-managed and expertly timed for the benefit of North and South American spenders, to the end that the deliriousness shall abate automatically in exact proportion as the spenders quit spending. In short, so much of what is typically Parisian that, really Paris, on its merits, is entitled to a couple of chapters of its own, all of which naturally brings us to the two remaining great cities of mid-Europe, Berlin and Vienna, and leads us to the inevitable conclusion that the Europeans, in common with all other peoples on the earth, only succeed when they try to be desperately wicked in being desperately dull, whereas when they seek their pleasures in a natural manner they present racial slants and angles that are very interesting to observe and very pleasant to have a hand in. Take the Germans now. No less astute a world traveler than Samuel G. Blythe is sponsor for the assertion that the Berliners follow the night life route because the Kaiser found his capital did not attract the tourist types to the extent he had hoped, and so decreed that his faithful and devoted subjects, leaving their cozy hearths and englenux, should go forth at the hour when graveyards yawn, and who could blame them to spend the dragging time until dawn in being merry and bright, so saying his majesty went to bed, leaving them to work while he slept. After viewing the situation at first hand the present writer is of the opinion that Mr. Blythe was quite right in his statements. Absolutely nothing is more soothing to the eye of the onlooker, nothing more restful to his soul than to behold a group of Germans enjoying themselves in a normal manner. An absolutely nothing is quite so ghastly sad as the sight of those same well-fleshed Germans cavorting about between the hours of two and four-thirty a.m., trying, with all the pachydermic preponderance of Barnum's elephant quadril, to be professionally gay and cut-up-ish. The Prussians must love their Kaiser dearly. We sit up with our friends when they are dead. They stay up for him until they are ready to die themselves. As is well known, Berlin abounds in pleasure-palaces, so called. Enormous palaces these are, where under one wide-spreading roof are three or four separate restaurants of augmented size, not to mention wine cellars and beer-caves below stairs, and a dance hall or so, and a Turkish bath, and a bar, and a skating rink, and a concert hall, and any number of private dining rooms. The German mind invariably associates size with enjoyment. To these establishments after his regular dinner, the Berliner repairs with his family, his friend, or his guest. There is one especially popular resort, a combination of restaurant and vaudeville theater, at which one eats an excellent dinner excellently served, and between courses witnesses the turns of a first-rate variety bill, always with the inevitable team of American coon-shouters, either in fast colors of the burnt court variety, sandwiched into the program somewhere. In the Friedrichstrasse there is another place, called the Admiral's Palace, which is even more attractive. Here in closing a big oval-shaped ice arena, balcony after balcony rises circling to the roof. On one of these balconies you sit, and while you dine and after you have dined, you look down on a most marvelous series of skating stunts. In rapid and bewildering secession there are ballets on skates, solo skating numbers, skating carnivals, and skating races. Finally, scenery is slid on in runners and the whole company, in costumes grotesque and beautiful, go through a burlesque that keeps you laughing when you are not applauding and admiring when you are doing neither. While alternating light waves from overhead electric devices flood the picture with shifting, shimmering tides of color. It is like seeing a Christmas pantomime under an aurora borealis. In America we could not do these things, at least we have never done them. Either the performance would be poor, or the provender would be highly expensive, or both. But here the show is wonderful, and the visuals are good and not extravagantly priced, and everybody has a bully time. At eleven-thirty or thereabout the show at the Ice Palace is over, concluding with a push-ball match between teams of husky maidens who were apparently born on skates and raised on skates, and would not feel natural unless they were curveding about on skates. Their skates seem as much a part of them as tales to mermaids. It is bedtime now for sane folks, but at this moment a certain madness which does not at all fit in with the true German temperament descends on the crowd. Some go upstairs to another part of the building, where there is a dance hall called the Admiral Schazzinoe, but to the truly swagger one should hasten to the Palais-Judance on the second floor of the big Metropole Palace in the Berenstrasse. This place opens promptly at midnight and closes promptly at two o'clock in the morning. Inasmuch as the Palais-Judance is an institution borrowed outright from the French, they have adopted a typically French custom here. As the visitor enters, if he be a stranger, a flunky and gorgeous livery intercepts him, and demands an entrance fee amounting to about a dollar and a quarter in our money, as I recall. This tariff, the American or Englishman pays, but the practiced Berliner merely suggests to the doorkeeper the expediency of his taking a long running start and jumping off into space, and stalks defiantly in without forking over a single fennig to any person whatsoever. The Palais-Judance is incomparably the most beautiful ballroom in the world, so people who have been all over the world agree, and it is spotlessly clean and free from brackish smells, which is more than can be said of any French establishment of similar character I have seen. At the Palais-Judance the patron sits at a table, a table with something on it besides a cloth being an essential adjunct to complete the enjoyment of an evening of a German revelry, and as he sits and drinks he listens to the playing of a splendid band and looks on the dancing. Nothing is drunk except wine, and by wine I mainly mean champagne of the most Swedish and sickish brand obtainable. Elsewhere for one twentieth the cost the German could have the best and purest beer that is made, but he is out now for the big night. Accordingly he saturates his tissues with the sugary bubble water of France. He does not join in the dancing himself. The men dancers are nearly all paid dancers, I think, and the beautifully clad women who dance are either professionals too, or else belong to a profession that is older even than dancing is. They all dance with a profound German gravity and precision. Here is music to set a wooden leg a-jigging, but these couples circle and glide and dip with an incomprehensible decorum and slowness. When we were there they were dancing the tango or one of its manifold variations. All Europe, like all America, was, for the moment, tango mad. While we were in Paris, Mr. Jean Richepin lectured before the French immortals of the five academies assembled in solemn conclave at the Institute of France. They are called the forty immortals because nobody can remember the names of more than five of them. He took for his subject the tango, his motto in short being one borrowed from the conductors in the New York subway. Mind your step. While he spoke, which was for an hour or more, the babaged and berebanned bosoms of his illustrious compatriots heaved with emotion. Their faces, or such parts of their faces as were visible above the whisker line, flushed with enthusiasm, and most vociferously they applauded his masterly phrasing and his tracing out of the evolution of the tango, all the way from its genesis, as it were, to its revelation. I judged the revelation particularly appealed to them, that part of it appeals to so many. After that the tango seemed literally to trail us. We could not escape it. While we were in Berlin the emperor saw fit officially to forbid the dancing of the tango by officers of his navy and army. We reached England just after the vogue for tango teas had started. Naturally we went to one of these affairs. It took place at a theatre. Such is the English way of interpreting the poetry of motion, to hire someone else to do it for you and, in order to get the worth of your money, to sit and swizzle tea while the paid performer is doing it. At the tango tea we patronized, the tea was up to standard, but the dancing of the box ankleed professionals was a disappointment. Beforehand I had been told that the scene on the stage would be a veritable picture. And so it was Rosa Bonner's horse fair. End of Section 25. Section 26 of Europe revised. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Chapter 12. Nightlife with the Life Part Missing. Part 2. As a matter of fact the best dancer I saw in Europe was a performing trick pony in a winter circus in Berlin. I also remember with distinctness of detail a chorus man who took part in a new Lehar opera there in Berlin. I do not remember him for his dancing, because he was no clumsier afoot than his compatriots in the chorus rank and file, or for his singing since I could not pick his voice out from the combined voices of the others. I remember him because he wore spectacles. Not a monocle, nor yet a pair of nose glasses, but heavy-rimmed, double-lensed, German spectacles with gold bows extending up behind his ears like the roots of an old-fashioned wisdom tooth. Come to think about it, I know of no reason why a chorus man should not wear spectacles if he needs them in his business, or if he thinks they will add to his native beauty. But the spectacle of that bolster-built youth, dressed now as a Spanish cavalier and now as a Venetian gondolier, prancing about with his spectacles gobbling owlishly out at the audience, and once in a while, when a gleam from the footlights caught on them, turning to two red-hot discs set in the middle of his face, was a thing that is going to linger in my memory when a lot of more important matters are entirely forgotten. Not even in Paris did the tango experts compare with the tango experts one sees in America. At this juncture I pause a moment, giving opportunity for some carping critic to rise and call my attention to the fact that perhaps the most distinguished of the early school of turkey trodders bears a French name and came to us from Paris. To which I reply that so he does and so he But I add then the counter-argument that he came to us by way of Paris, at the conclusion of a round trip that started in the old fourth ward of the borough of Manhattan, city of greater New York, for he was born and bred on the east side, and moreover was born bearing the name of a race of kings famous in the south of Ireland and along the Bowery. And he learned his art not only the rudiments of it, but the final finished polish of it, in the dance halls of Third Avenue, where the best slow time dancers on earth come from. It was after he had acquired a French accent and had gollicized his name, thereby causing a general turning over of old settlers in the graveyards of the county Clair, that he returned to us a conspicuous figure in the world of art and fashion, and was able to get twenty-five dollars an hour for teaching the sons and daughters of our richest families to trip the light fantastic go. At the same time, be it understood, I am not here to muck-rake the past of one so prominent and affluent in the most honored and lucrative of modern professions. But facts are facts, and these particular facts are quoted here to bind and buttress my claim that the best dancers are the American dancers. After this digression let us hurry right back to that loyal burlinner whom we left seated in the Palais du Danse on the Baronstrasse, waiting for the hour of two in the morning to come. The hour of two in the morning does come. The lights die down. The dancers pick up their heavy feet. It takes an effort to pick up those continental feet, and quit the wax and floor. The Oberkelner comes round with his gold chain of office dangling on his breast and collects for the wine, and our German friend, politely inhaling his yawns, gets up and goes elsewhere to finish his good time, and gall darn it how he does dread it. Yet he goes, faithful soul that he is. He goes, let us say, to the pavilion muscat, no dancing but plenty of drinking and music and food, which opens at two and stays open until four, when it shuts up shop in order that another place in the nature of a cabaret may open. And so, between five and six o'clock in the morning of the new day, when the lady-garbage men and the gentlemen chambermaids of the German capital are abroad on their several duties, he journeys homeward, and so, as Mr. Pip has said, to bed, with nothing disagreeable to look forward to except repeating the same dose all over again the coming night. This sort of thing would kill anybody except oppression. For Mark, you, between intervals of drinking, he has been eating all night, but then oppression has no digestion. He merely has gross tonnage in the place where his digestive apparatus ought to be. The time to see a German enjoying himself is when he is following his own bent, and not obeying the imperial edict of his gracious sovereign. I had a most excellent opportunity of observing him while engaged in his own private pursuits of pleasure when, by chance one evening, in the course of a solitary prowl, I bumped into a sort of burlin-esque version of Coney Island, with the island part missing. It was not out in the suburbs where one would naturally expect to find such a resort. It was in the very middle of the city, just round the corner from the cafe district, not more than half a mile, as the blood-worse vies, from Unterden-Linden. Even at this distance, and after a considerable lapse of time, I can still appreciate that place, though I cannot pronounce it, for it had a name consisting of one of those long German compound words that run all the way round a fellow's face and lap over at the back, like a clergyman's collar, and it had also a sub-name that no living person could hope to utter, unless he had a thorough German education and throat trouble. You meet such nouns frequently in Germany. They are not meant to be spoken, you gargle them. To speak the full name of this park would require two able-bodied persons. One to start it off and carry it along until his larynx gave out, and the other to take it up at that point and finish it. But for all the nine jointed impressiveness of its title, this park was a live, brisk little park full of sideshow tents sheltering mildly amusing, faked-up attractions, with painted banners flapping in the air and barkers speeling before the entrances, and all the ballyhooes going at full blast. Altogether a creditable imitation of a street fair, thus witnessed in any American town that has a good live Elk's Lodge in it. Plainly the place was popular. Germans of all conditions, in all ages and sizes, but mainly the broader lasts, were winding about it in thick streams in the narrow crooked alleys formed by the various tents. They packed themselves in front of each booth where a free exhibition was going on, and when the free part was over and the regular performance began, they struggled good-naturedly to pay the admission fee and enter in at the door. And for a price there were freaks to be seen who properly belonged on our side of the water, it seemed to me. I had always supposed them to be exclusively domestic articles until I encountered them here. There was a regular Bosco, a genuine hare he alive them eats, sitting in his canvas den entirely surrounded by a choice and tasty selection of eating snakes. The Orthodox tattooed man was there, too, first standing up to display the text and accompanying illustrations on his front cover, and then turning around so the crowd might read what he said on the other side. And there was many another familiar freak introduced to our fathers by old Dan Rice and to us, their children, through the good offices of Daniel's long and noble line of successors. A seasonable Sunday is a fine time, and the big zoological garden, which is a favorite place for studying the Berlin populace at the diversions they prefer when left to their own devices. At one table will be a cluster of students with their queer little pillbox caps of all colors, their close-cropped heads and well-shaved necks, and their sabers-scarred faces. At the next table half a dozen spectacled, long- coated men who look as though they might be university professors are confabbing earnestly. And at the next table and the next and the next, and so on, until the aggregate runs into big figures, our family groups, grand sires, fathers, mothers, and suncles and children, on down to the babies in arms. By the unaccountable thousands, they spend the afternoon here munching sausages and sipping lager and enjoying the excellent music that is invariably provided. At each plate there is a beer mug, for everybody is forever drinking and nobody is ever drunk. You see a lot of this sort of thing, not only in the parks and gardens so numerous in and near any German city, but anywhere on the continent. Seeing it helps an American to understand a main difference between the American Sabbath and the European Sunday. We keep it, and they spend it. I am given to understand that Vienna nightlife is the most alluring, the most abandoned, the most wicked, and the wildest of all nightlife. Probably this is so. Certainly it is the most cloistered and the most inaccessible. The V&S does not deliberately exploit his nightlife to prove to all the world that he is a gay dog and will not go home until morning though it kill him, as the German does. Neither does he maintain it for the sake of the coin to be extracted from the pockets of the tourists, as do the Parisians. With him his nightlife is a thing he has created and which he supports for his own enjoyment. And so it goes on, not out in the open, not press-agented, not advertised, but behind closed doors. He does not care for the stranger's presence, nor does he suffer it either, unless the stranger is properly vouched for. The best theaters in Vienna are small, exclusive affairs, privately supported, and with seating capacity for a few chosen patrons. Once he has quit the public café with its fine music and its bad waiters, the uninitiated traveler has a pretty lonesome time of it in Vienna. Until all hours he may roam the principal's streets seeking that fill-up of wickedness which will give zest to life and provide him with something to brag about when he gets back among the home folks again. He does not find it. Patrons would provide a much more exciting means of spending the evening, and in comparison with the sights he witnesses, anagrams and acrostics are positively thrilling. He is tantalized by the knowledge that all about him there are big doings, but so far as he is concerned he might just as well be attending a Sunday school cantana. Unless he be suitably introduced he will never have a chance to shake a foot with anybody, or buy a drink for somebody in the inner circles of Viennese nightlife. He is emphatically on the outside, denied even the poor satisfaction of looking in. At that I have a suspicion, born of casual observation among other races, that the Viennese has really a better time when he is not trying than when he is trying. CHAPTER XIII. OUR FRIEND THE ASSASSIN. PART I. No taste of the nightlife of Paris is regarded as complete without a visit to an Apache resort at the fag end of it. For orderly and law-abiding people, the disorderly and law-breaking people always have an immense fascination anyhow. The average person, though inclined to blink at whatever prevalence of the criminal classes may exist in his own community, desires above all things to know at first hand about the criminals of other communities. In these matters charity begins at home. Every New Yorker who journeys to the West wants to see a few road agents. Conversely, the Westerners are joining in New York, pesters his New York friends to lead him to the haunts of the gangsters. It makes no difference that in a Western town the prize-hold-up man is more apt than not to be a real estate dealer, that in New York the average run of citizens know no more of gangs than they know of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is to say, nothing at all. Same nature comes to the surface just the same. In Paris they order this thing differently. They exhibit the same spirit of enterprise that in a lesser degree characterized certain promoters of Rubberneck tours who some years ago fitted up make-believe opium dens in New York's Chinatown for the odd delectation of out-of-town spectators. Knowing from experience that every other American who lands in Paris will crave to observe the Apache while the Apache is in the act of a patching round, the Cannae Parisians have provided a line of up-to-date Apache dens within easy walking distance of Montmartre, and thither the guides lead the round-eyed tourists and they are introduce him to well-drilled, carefully made-up Apaches and Apacheses engaged in their customary sports and pastimes for as long as he is willing to pay out money for the privilege. Being forewarned of this, I naturally desire to see the genuine article. I took steps to achieve that end. Suitably chaperoned by a trio of transplanted Americans who knew a good bit about the Paris underworld, I rode over miles of bumpy cobblestones until, along about four o'clock in the morning, our taxicab turned into a dim back street opening off one of the big public markets, and drew up in front of a grimy establishment rejoicing in the happy and well-chosen name of the Cave of Innocence. A lighting we passed through a small boozing ken, where a frowsy woman presided over a bar, serving drinks to smocked marketmen, and at the rear descended a steep flight of stone steps. At the foot of the stairs we came on two gendarmes who sat side by side on a wooden bench, having apparently nothing else to do except to caress their goatees and finger their swords. Whether the gendarmes were stationed here to keep the apaches from preying on the marketmen, or the marketmen from preying on the apaches, I know not. But having subsequently purchased some fresh fruit in that self-same market, I should say now that if anybody about the premises needed police protection, it was the apaches. My money would be on the marketmen every time. Beyond the cuchant gendarmes we traversed a low, winding passage cut of stone, and so came at length to what seemingly had originally been a wine vault, hollowed out far down beneath the foundations of the building. The ceiling was so low that a tall man must stoop to avoid knocking his head off. The place was full of smells that had crawled in a couple of hundred years before and had died without benefit of clergy, and had remained there ever since. For its chief item of furniture the cavern had a wicked old piano, with its lid missing, so that its yellowed teeth showed in a perpetual snarl. I judged some of its most important vital organs were missing too after I heard it played. On the walls were inscribed such words as naughty little schoolboys right on schoolhouse fences in this country, and more examples of this pleasing brand of literature were carved on the whittled oak benches and the rickety wooden stools. So much for the physical furbishings. By rights, by all the hallowed rules and precedents of the American vaudeville stage, the denizens of this cozy retreat in the bowels of the earth should have been wearing high-waisted baggy velvet trousers and drinking absinthe out of the large flagons, and stabbing one another between the shoulder blades, and ever and anon in the mystic mazes of the dance, playing crack the whip with the necks and heels of their adoring lady friends. But such was not found to be the case. In all these essential and traditional regards the assembled innocence were as poignantly disappointing as the coasters of London had proved themselves. According to all the printed information on the subject the London costar wears clothes covered up with pearl buttons, and spends his time swapping ready repartee with his donna or his dina. The costars I saw were bare enough pearl buttons and silent of speech, and almost invariably they had left their donnas at home. Similarly these gentlemen habitués of the cave of innocence wore few or no velvet pants and guzzled little or none of the absinthe. Their favorite tipple appeared to be beer, and their female companions snuggled closely beside them. We stayed among them fully twenty minutes, but not a single person was stabbed while we were there. It must have been an off-night for stabbings. Still I judged them to have been genuine exhibits because here for the first, last, and only time in Paris I found a shop where a stranger ready to spend a little money was not welcomed with vociferous enthusiasm. The paired-off cave-dwellers merely scowled on us as we scrounge past them to a vacant bench in a far corner. The waiter, though, bowed before us, a shock-headed personage in the ruins of a dress-suit, at the same time saying words which I took to be complementary until one of my friends explained that he had called us something that might freely be translated as a certain kind of female lobster. Circumstrived by our own inflexible and unyielding language we in America must content ourselves with calling a man a plain lobster, but the limber-tongued gall goes further than that. He calls you a female lobster, which seems somehow or other to make it more binding. However, I do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately offensive, for presently, having first served us with beer which for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and that all the world was a green poison, so right off I knew what his trouble was, for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has liver for breakfast every morning. The waiter was bilious, that was what ailed him. For the sake of the conventions I tried to feel apprehensive of grave peril. It was no use. I felt safe, not exactly comfortable but perfectly safe. I could not even muster up a spasm of the spine when a member of our party leaned over and whispered in my ear that any one of these gentry round about us would cheerfully cut a man's throat for twenty-five cents. I was surprised, though, at the moderation of the cost. This was the only cheap thing I had struck in Paris. It was cheaper even than the same job as supposed to be in the district round Chatham Square on the east side of New York, where the credulous stranger so frequently is told that he can have a plain murder done for five dollars, or a fancy murder with trimmings for ten, rate card covering other jobs on application. In America, however, it has been my misfortune that I did not have the right amount handy, and here in Paris I was handicapped by my inability to make change correctly. By now I would not have trusted anyone in Paris to make change for me, not even an Apache. I was sorry for this, for at a quarter ahead I should have been very glad to engage a troop of Apaches to kill me about two dollars worth of cab drivers and waiters. For one of the waiters at our hotel I would have been willing to pay as much as fifty cents, provided they killed him very slowly. Because of the reasons named, however, I had to come away without making any deal, and I have always regretted it. At the outset of the chapter immediately preceding this one I said the English had no nightlife. This was a slight but a pardonable misstatement of the actual facts. The Englishman has not so much nightlife as the Parisian, the Berliner, the V&S, or the Budapest, but he has more nightlife in his town of London than the Roman has in his town of Rome. In Rome nightlife for the foreigner consisted of going indoors at eventide and until bedtime figuring up how much money he has been skinned out of during the course of the day just done, and for the native in going indoors and counting up how much money he has skinned the foreigner out of during the day aforesaid. London has its nightlife, but it ends early, in the very shank of the evening, so to speak. This is due in a measure to the operation of the early closing law, which, however, does not apply if you are a bona fide traveller stopping at your own inn. There the ancient tavern law protects you. You may sit at ease and, if so minded, may drink and eat until daylight doth appear or doth not appear, as is generally the case in the foggy season. There is another law of newer origin to prohibit the taking of children under a certain age into a public house. On the passage of this act there at once sprang up a congenial and lucrative employment for those horrible old women drunkards who are so distressingly numerous in the poorer quarters of the town. Regardless of the weather, one of these bedrabbled creatures stationed herself just outside the door of a pub. Along comes a mother with a thirst and a child. Surrendering her offspring to the temporary care of the hag, the mother goes within and has her refreshment at the bar. When wiping her mouth on the back of her hand she comes forth to reclaim her youngster, she gives the other woman a half-penny for her trouble, and eventually the other woman harvests enough half-penny to buy a dram of gin for herself. On a rainy day I have seen a draggled, serigamp-looking female caring for as many as four damp infants under the drippy portico of an east-end groggery. It is to the cafes that the early closing law chiefly applies. The cafes are due to close for business within half an hour after midnight. When the time for shutting up draws nigh the managers do not put their lingering patrons out physically. The individual's body is a sacred thing, personal liberty being most dear to an Englishman. It will be made most dear to you, too, in the law courts if you infringe on it by violence or otherwise. No, they have a gentler system than that, one that is free from noise, excitement, and all-mussy work. Along toward twelve o'clock the waiters begin going about turning out the lights. The average London restaurant is none too brightly illuminated to start with, being a dim and dingy, ill-kept place compared with the glary, shiny lobster palace that we know, so instantly you are made aware of a thickening of the prevalent gloom. The waiters start in at the far end of the room and turn out a few lights. Being nearer and nearer to you they turn out more lights, and finally, by way of strengthening the hint, they turn out the lights immediately above your head, which leaves you in the stilly dark with no means of seeing your food even, unless you have taken the precaution to spread phosphorus on your sandwich instead of mustard, which, however, is seldom done. A better method is to order a portion of one of the more luminous varieties of imported cheese. CHAPTER XIII. The best thing of all, however, is to take your hat and stick and go away from there. And then, unless you belong to a regular club or carry a card of admission to one of the chartered, all-night clubs that have sprung up so abundantly in London, which are uniformly stuffy, stupid places, where the members take their roisterings seriously, or as a last resort, unless you care to sit for a tiresome hour or two in the grill of your hotel, you might as well be toddling away to bed. That is to say, you might as well go to bed unless you find the scenes in the street as worthwhile as I found them. At this hour London's droning voice has abated to a deep hoarse snore. London has become a great, broody giant, taking rest that is troubled by the snatches of wakefulness. London's grimy, lined face shows new wrinkles of shadow, and new and unexpected clumping of colors in monotone and half-tone appear. From the masked-up bulk of things small detached bits stand vividly out, a flower-girl whose flowers and whose girlhood are alike in the sear and yellow leaf, a soldier swaggering by, his red coat lighting up the grayish mass about him like a live coal in an ash heap, a policeman escorting a drunk to quarters for the night, not, mind you, escorting him in a clanging, rushing patrol wagon which would serve to attract the public attention to the distressing state of the overcome one, but conveying him quietly, un-ostentatiously, surreptitiously almost, in a small-wheeled vehicle partaking somewhat of the nature of a baby carriage, and somewhat of the nature of a push cart. The policeman shoves this along the road jailward, and the drunk lies at rest in it, stretched out full-length with a neat rubber bedspread drawn up over his prostrate form to screen him from drafts and save his face from the gaze of the vulgar. Drunkards are treated with the tenderest consideration in London, for as you know, Britons never will be slaves, though some of them in the presence of a title give such imitations of being slaves as might fool even so experienced a judge as the late Simon Legree, and, as per chance you might have also heard, an Englishman's sauce is his castle. So in due state they ride him and his turreted sauce to the station house in a perambulator. From midnight to daylight the taxi cabs by the countless swarm will be charging about in every direction, charging moreover at the rate of eight pence a mile. Keep that over, ye taxi-taxed wretches of New York, and rend your garments with lamentations loud. There is also this to be said of the London Taxi Service, and, to an American, it is one of the abiding marvels of the place. That no matter where you go, no matter how late the hour or how outlying it obscures the district, there is always a trim taxi cab just round the next corner waiting to come instantly at your whistle, and with it a beggar with a bleak hopeless face to open the cab door for you and stand, hat in hand, for the penny you toss him. In the main centers, such as Oxford Circus and Piccadilly Circus and Charring Cross, and along the embankment, the Strand and the Palm Mall, they are as thick as fleas on the Missouri Hound Dog, famous in song and story. The taxis, I mean, though the beggars are reasonably thick also, and they hop like fleas, bearing you swiftly and surely and cheaply on your way. The meters are honest, open-faced meters, and the drivers ask no more than their legal fares and are satisfied with tips within reason. Here in America we have the kindred arts of taxidermy and taxicabery. One of these is the art of skinning animals and the other is the art of skinning people. The ruthless taxi robber of New York would not last half an hour in London, for him the jail doors would yawn. Old-time Londoners deplored the coming of the taxicab and the motor-bus, for their coming meant the entire extinction of the driver of the horse-drawn bus, who was an institution, and the practical extinction of the handsome cabbie, who was a type and very frequently a humorous too. But an American finds no fault with the present arrangement. He is amply satisfied with it. Personally I can think of no more exciting phrase of the nightlife of the two greatest cities of Europe than the stunt of dodging taxicabs. In London the peril that lurks for you at every turning is not the result of carelessness on the part of the drivers, it is due to the rules of the road. A foot, an Englishman meeting you on the sidewalk, turns as we do to the right hand, but mounted he turns to the left. The foot passengers' prerogative of turning to the right was one of the priceless heritages rested from King John by the barons at Runnymede, but when William the Conqueror rode into the battle of Hastings he rode a left-handed horse, and so very naturally and very properly everything on hoof or wheel in England has consistently turned to the left ever since. I took some pains to look up the original precedents for these facts and to establish them historically. The system suits the English mind, but it is highly confusing to an American who gets into the swirl of traffic at a crossing, and every London crossing is a swirl of traffic most of the time, and looks left where he should look right and looks right when he should be looking left until the very best he can expect, if he survive at all, is cross- eyes and nervous prostration. I lost count of the number of close calls from utter and mussy destruction I had while in London. Sometimes a policeman took pity on me and saved me, and again by quick and frenzied leaping I saved myself. But then the London cab men were poor marksmen at best. In front of the Savoy one night the same cab men in rapid secession had two beautiful shots at me, and each time missed the bullseye by a disqualifying margin of inches. A New York chauffeur who had failed to splatter me all over the Vincenage at the first chance would have been ashamed to go home afterward and look his innocent little ones in the face. Even now I cannot decide in my own mind which is the more fearsome and perilous thing, to be a foot in Paris at the mercy of all the maniacs who drive French motor-cars, or to be in one of the motor-cars at the mercy of one of the maniacs. Motoring in Paris is the most dangerous sport known. Just as dueling is the safest. There are some arguments to be advanced in favor of dueling. It provides copy for the papers and harmless excitement for the participants, and it certainly gives them a chance to get a little fresh air occasionally, but with motoring it is different. In Paris there are no rules of the road except just these two. The pedestrian who gets run over is liable to prosecution, and all motor-cars must travel at top speed. If I live to be a million I shall never get over shuttering as I think back to a taxicab ride I had in the rush hour one afternoon over a route that extended from a way down near the side of the Bastille to a hotel a way up near the Place Vendome. The driver was a congenital madman, the same as all Parisian taxicab drivers are, and in addition he was on this occasion acquiring special merit by being quite drunk. This last, however, was a detail that did not dawn on my perceptions until too late to cancel the contract. Once he had got me safely fastened inside his rickety, creaky devil wagon he pulled all the stops all the way out and went tearing up the crowded boulevard like a comet with a can tied to its tail. I hammered on the glass and begged him to slow down, that is, I hammered on the glass and tried to beg him to slow down. For just such emergencies I had previously stocked up with two French words, doucement and vite. I knew that one of those words meant speed and the other meant less speed, but in the turmoil of the moment I may have confused them slightly. Anyhow, to be on the safe side I yelled vite a while, and then doucement and vite alternately, and mixed in a few short, simple Anglo-Saxon cuss words and prayers for addressing. But nothing I said seemed to have the least effect on that demonic scoundrel. Without turning his head he merely shouted back something unintelligible and threw on more juice. On and on we tore, slicing against the sidewalk, curving and jibbing, clattering and careening, now going on two wheels and now on four, while the lunatic shrieked curses of disappointment at the pedestrians who scuttled away to safety from our charging onslaughts, and I held both hands over my mouth to keep my heart from jumping out into my lap. I saw, with instantaneous but photographic distinctness, a lady with a dog tucked under her arm, who hesitated a moment in our very path. She was one of the largest ladies I ever saw, and the dog under her arm was certainly the smallest dog I ever saw. You might say the lady was practically out of dog. I thought we had heard probably her dog, too, but she fell back and was saved by a matter of half an inch or so. I think, though, we got some of the buttons off her shirt-waist and the back trimming of her hat. Then there was a rending, tearing crash as we took a fender off a machine just emerging from across street, but my lunatic never checked up at all. He just flung a curling ribbit of profanity over his shoulder at the other driver, and bounded onward like a bat out of the bad place. That was the hour when my hair began to turn perceptively grayer. And yet when by a secession of miracles we had landed intact at my destination, the fiend seemed to think he had done a praiseworthy and creditable thing. I only wish he had been able to understand the things I called him. That is all I wish. It is by a succession of miracles that the members of his maniacal craft usually do dodge death and destruction. The providence that watches over the mentally deficient has the minutes' care, I guess, and the same beneficent influence frequently avails to save those who ride behind them and, to a lesser extent, those who walk ahead. Once in a while a Paris cabman does have a lucky stroke and garner in a foot-traveler. In an instant a vast and surging crowd convenes. In another instant the road is impassibly blocked. Up rushes a gendarme and worms his way through the press to the center. He has a notebook in his hand. In this book he enters the gloating cabman's name, his age, his address, his wife's maiden name, if any, and gets his views on the dryfish case, and finds out what he thinks about the separation of church and state, and tells him that if he keeps on the way he is headed he will be getting the cross of the Legion of Honor pretty soon. They shake hands and embrace, and the cabman cuts another notch in his mudguard, and gets back on the seat and drives on. Then if, by any chance, the victim of the accident still breathes, the gendarme arrests him for interfering with the traffic. It is a lovely system and sweetly typical. To the general classification of thrilling moments in the nightlife of Europe, I should like to list a carriage trip through the outskirts of Naples after dark. In the first place the carriage driver is an Italian driver, which is a shorter way of saying he is the worst driver living. His idea of getting service out of a horse is, first to snatch him to a standstill by yanking on the bit and then to force the poor brood into a gallop by lashing at him with a whip, having a particularly loud and vixenish cracker on it, and at every occasion to whoop at the top of his voice. In the second place the street is as narrow as a narrow alley, feebly lighted and has no sidewalks. And the ready-paving stones which stretch from house-front to house-front are crawling with people and goats and dogs and children. Finally to add zest to the affair there are lots of loose cows mooning about, for at this hour the cowherd brings his stock to the doors of his patrons. In an Italian city the people get their milk from a cow instead of from a milkman as with us. The milk is delivered on the hoof, so to speak. The grown-ups refuse to make way for you to pass, and the swarming young ones repay you for not killing them by pelting pebbles and less pleasant things into your face. Beggars in all degrees of filth and deformity and repulsiveness run alongside the carriage in imminent danger from the wheels, begging for alms. If you give them something they curse you for not giving them more and if you give them nothing they spit at you for a base dog of a heretic. But then what could you naturally expect from a population that thinks fried cuttlefish is edible and beefsteak is not? For more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org. Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. CHAPTER XIV. THAT GAY PARENTSIS PART I. As you walk along the rue de la paix, footnote, the X being one of the few silent things in France, and pay and pay and keep on paying, your eye is constantly engaged by two inscriptions that occur and recur with the utmost frequency. One of these appears in nearly every shop window and over nearly every shop door. It says, English Spoken Here. This I may tell you is one of the few absolutely truthful and dependable statements encountered by the tourist in the French capital. Invariably English is spoken here. It is spoken here during all the hours of the day and until far into the dusk of the evening. Spoken loudly, clearly, distinctly, hopefully, hopelessly, stridently, hoarsely, despondently, despairingly, and finally profanely, by any Americans who are trying to make somebody round the place understand what they are driving at. The other inscription is carved, painted, or printed on all public buildings, on most monuments, and on many private establishments as well. It is the motto of the French Republic, reading as follows, liberty, economy, frugality, footnote, free translation. The first word of this, the liberty part, is applicable to the foreigner and is aimed directly at him as a prayer, an injunction and a command, while the rest of it, the economy and the frugality, is competently attended to by the Parisians themselves. The foreigner has only to be sufficiently liberal, and he is assured of a flattering reception wheresoever his straying footsteps may carry him, whether in Paris or in the provinces, but wheresoever those feet of his do carry him he will find a people distinguished by a frugality and inspired by an economy of the frugalist and most economical character conceivable. In the streets of the Metropolis he is expected, when going anywhere, to hail the fast, flitting taxicab, footnote stops on signal only and sometimes not then, though the residents patronize the public bus. Indeed, the distinction is made clear to his understanding from the moment he passes the first outlying fortress at the national frontier, footnote, flag station, since, for the looks of things, if no better reason, he must travel first class on the deluxe trains, footnote, dinner taken off when you are about half through eating, whereas the Frenchmen pack themselves tightly but verbally into the second class and the third class compartments. Before I went to France I knew Saint-Denis was the patron saint of the French, but I did not know exactly why until I heard the legend connected with his death. When the executioner on the hill at Montmartre cut off his head, the good saint picked it up and strolled across the fields with it tucked under his arm, so runs the tail. His head in that shape was no longer of any particular value to him, but your true Parisian is of a saving disposition. And so the Paris population have worshipped Saint-Denis ever since. Both as a saint and as a citizen he filled the bill. He would not throw anything away whether he needed it or not. Paris, not the Paris of the art lover, nor the Paris of the lover of history, nor yet again the Paris of the worthwhile Parisians, but the Paris which the casual male visitor samples is the most overrated thing on earth, I reckon, except alligator pear salad and the most costly. Its system of conduct is predicated, based, organized, and manipulated on the principle that a foreigner with plenty of money and no soul will be along pretty soon. This by day and by night the deadfall is rigged and the trap is set and baited. Baited with a spurious gaiety and an imitation joyousness, but the joyousness is as thin as one coat of sizing, and the brass shines through the plating, and behind the painted, parted lips of laughter the sharp teeth of greed show in a glittering double row. Yet gallus Mr. Fly, from the U.S.A., walks debonairly in and out comes Mr. Spider, ably seconded by Madame Spiderette, and between them they despoil him with the utmost dispatch. When he is not being molested for large sums he is being nicked for small ones. It is tip, brother, tip, and keep right on tipping. I heard a story of an American who spent a month in Paris taking in the sights and being taken in by them, and another month motoring through the country. At length he reached the port once he was to sail from home. He went aboard the steamer and saw to it that his belongings were properly stored, and in the privacy of his stateroom he sat down to take an inventory of his letter of credit, now reduced to a wine and wasted specter of its one plethorific self. In the midst of casting up he heard the signal for departure, and so he went topside of the ship, and stationing himself on the promenade deck alongside the gang-plank he raised his voice and addressed the assembled multitude on the pier, substantially as follows. If, these were his words, if there is a single solitary individual in this fair land who has not touched me for something of value, if there be in all France a man, woman, or child who has not been tipped by me, let him, her, or it speak now or forever after hold their peace, because no ye all men by these presents I am about to go away from here and if I stay in my right mind I am not coming back. And several persons were badly heard in the crush, but they were believed afterward to have been repeaters. I thought this story was overdrawn, but after traveling over some with the same route which this fellow countrymen had taken, I came to the conclusion that it was no exaggeration, but a true bill in all particulars. On the night of our second day in Paris we went to a theater to see one of the topical reviews, in which Paris is supposed to excel, and for sheer dreariness and blatant vulgarity Paris reviews do indeed excel anything of a similar nature as done in either England or in America, which is saying quite a mouthful. In the French review the members of the chorus reach their artistic limit in costuming when they dance forth from the wings wearing short and shabby undergarments over soiled pink fleshings, and any time the dramatic interest begins to run low and gurgle in the pipes, a male comedian pumps it up again by striking or kicking a woman. But to kick her is regarded as much the more whimsical conceit. This invariably sets the audience rocking with uncontrollable merriment. How some ever I am not writing a critique of the merits of the performance. If I were I should say that to begin with the title of the piece was wrong. It should have been called lapsis lingerie, signifying, as the Latins would say, a mere slip. At this moment I am concerned with what happened upon our entrance. At the door a middle-aged female, who was raising a natty mustache, handed us programs. I paid her for the programs and tipped her. She turned us over to a stout brunette lady who was cultivating a neat and flossy pair of mutton chops. This person escorted us down to the aisle where our seats were, so I tipped her. Alongside our seats stood a third member of the sisterhood, chiefly distinguished from her confrairs by the fact that she was turning out something very fetching in the way of a brown van dyke, and after we were seated she continued to stand there, holding forth her hand toward me, palm up and fingers extended in the national gesture, and saying something in her native tongue very rapidly. Incidentally she was blocking the path of a number of people who had come down the aisle immediately behind us. I thought possibly she desired to see our coupons, so I hauled them out and exhibited them. She shook her head at that and gabbled faster than ever. It next occurred to me that perhaps she wanted to furnish us with programs and was asking in advance for the money with which to pay for them. I explained to her that I already secured programs from her friend with a mustache. I did this mainly in English, but partly in French. At least I employed the correct French word for program, which is program. To prove my case I pulled the two programs from my pocket and showed them to her. She continued to shake her head with great emphasis, babbling on at an increased speed. The situation was beginning to verge on the embarrassing when a light dawned upon me. She wanted a tip. That was it. She had not done anything to earn a tip that I could see, and unless one had been reared in the barbering business she was not particularly attractive to look on, and even then only in a professional aspect. But I tipped her and bade her be gone, and straight way she bewent, satisfied and smiling. From that moment on I knew my book. When in doubt I tipped one person, the person nearest to me. When in deep doubt I tipped two or more persons, and all was well. On the next evening but one I had another lesson which gave me further insight into the habits and customs of these gay and glad-some Parisians. We were completing a round of the all-night cafes and cabarets. There were four of us. Briefly we had seen the dead rat, the abbey, the bale-tiberin, the red mill, maxims, and the rest of the lot to the total number of perhaps ten or twelve. We had listened to bad singing, looked on bad dancing, sipped gingerly at bad drinks, and nibbled daintily at bad food, and the taste of it all was as grit and ashes in our mouths. We had learned for ourselves that the much-vaunted gay life of Paris was just as sad and sordid and sloppy and unsavory as the so-called gay life of any other city with a lesser reputation for gay life and gay livers. A scrap of the grizzle-lend of the New York Tenderloin, a suggestion of a certain part of New Orleans, a short cross-section of the Levée in Chicago, a dab of the Barbary Coast of San Francisco in its old, unexpurgated days, a touch of Piccadilly Circus in London after midnight, with a top-dressing of Gehenna the Unblessed, it had seemed to us a compound of these ingredients with a distinctive savor of what was essentially garlic, permenating through it like garlic through a stew. We had had enough. Even though we had attended only as onlookers and seekers after local color, we felt that we had a plenty of onlooking and entirely too much of local color. We felt that we should all go into retreat for a session of self-purification to rid our persons of the one and take a bath in formaldehyde to rinse our memories clean of the other. But the ruling spirit of the expedition pointed out that the evening would not be complete without a stop at a café that had, so he said, an international reputation for its supposed sauciness and its real bohemian atmosphere, whatever that might be, overcome by his argument we piled into a cab and departed thither. This particular café was found in its physical aspects to be typical of the breed and district. It was small, crowded, overheated, under-lighted, and stuffy desuffication with the mingled aromas of stale drink and cheap perfume. As we entered, a wrangle was going on among a group of young Frenchmen, picturesquely attired as art students, almost a sure sign that they were not art students. An undersized girl dressed in a shabby black and yellow frock was doing a Spanish dance on a cleared space in the middle of the floor. We knew her instantly for a Spanish dancer because she had a fan in one hand and a pair of castanets in the other. Another girl, dressed as a pierrot, was waiting to do her turn when the Spanish dancer finished. Weeriness showed through the lacquer of thick cosmetic on her peaked little face. An orchestra of three pieces sawed wood steadily and at intervals to prove that these were gay and bliesome revels, somebody connected with the establishment through small, party-colored balls of celluloid about. But what particularly caught our attention was the presence in a far corner of two little darkies in miniature dress suits, both very wally of eye, very brown of skin, and very shaved as to head, huddled together there as though for the poor comfort of physical contact. As soon as they saw us they left their place and sidled up, tickled beyond measure to behold American faces and hear American voices. They belonged, it seemed, to a troupe of jubilee singers who had been imported from the States for the delegation of French audiences. At night, after their work at a vaudeville theater was done, the members of their company were paired off and sent about to the cafes to earn their keep by singing ragtime songs and dancing buck dances. These two were desperately, pathetically homesick. One of them blinked back to the tears when he told us, with the plaintive African quaver in his voice, how long they had been away from their own country, and how happy they would be to get back to it again. We suddenly is glad to hear somebody talking to regular United States talk, same as we does, he said. We get mighty tired of all this year of French drabren. Yes, put in his partner, they make some mighty fuss over colored folks over here, but taint no ways like home. I comes from Birmingham, Alabama, myself. Does you gentlemen know anybody in Birmingham? They were the first really wholesome creatures who had crossed our paths that night. They crowded up close to us, and there they stayed until we left, as grateful as a pair of friendly puppies for a word or a look. Presently, though, something happened that made us forget these small, dark compatriots of ours. We had had sandwiches all round and a bottle of wine. When the waiter brought the check, it fell happily into the hands of the one person in our party who knew French, and what was an even more valuable accomplishment under the present circumstances knew the intricate French system of computing a bill. He ran a pencil down the figures. Then he consulted the price list on the menu and examined the label on the neck of the wine bottle, and then he gave a long whistle. What's the trouble? asked one of us. Oh, not much, he said. We had a bottle of wine priced at eighteen francs, and they have merely charged us twenty-four francs for it, six francs overcharge on that one item alone. The total for the sandwiches should have been six francs, and it is put down at ten francs. And here, a way down at the bottom, I find a mysterious entry of four francs, which seems to have no bearing on the case at all, unless it be that they just simply need the money. I expected to be skinned somewhat, but I object to being peeled. I'm afraid at the risk of appearing mercenary that will have to ask our friend for a recount. He beckoned the waiter to him and fired a volley of rapid French in the waiter's face. The waiter batted his eyes and shrugged his shoulders, then reversing the operation he shrugged his eyelids and batted his shoulder blades, meantime endeavoring voluably to explain. Our friend shoved the check into his hands and waved him away. He was back again in a minute with the amount corrected. That is, it was corrected to the extent that the wine item had been reduced to twenty-one francs, and the sandwiches to eight francs. By now our paymaster was hot as a hornet. His gorge rose, his free-born, independent American gorge. It rose clear to the ceiling and threw off sparks and red clinkers. He sent for the manager. The manager came, all bows and graciousness and rumply shirt front, and when he heard what was to be said he became all apologies and indignation. He regretted more than words could tell that the American gentleman who deigned to patronize his restaurant had been put to annoyance. The garçon, here he turned and burned up that individual with a fiery side-glance, was a debased idiot and the misbegotten son of yet a greater and still more debased idiot. The cashier was a green hand and an imbecile besides. It was incredible, impossible, that the overcharging had been done deliberately. That was inconceivable. But the honor of his establishment was at stake. They should both, garçon and cashier, be discharged on the spot. But, however, he would rectify all mistakes. Would Mishir entrust the miserable addition to him for a moment, for one short moment? Mishir would and did. This time the amount was made right and our friend handed over in payment a fifty-frank note. With his own hands the manager brought back the change. Counting it over the payee found it five-franks short. Attention being directed to this error the manager became more apologetic and more explanatory than ever and supplied the deficiency with a shiny new five-frank piece from his own pocket. And then when we had gone away from there and had traveled home more than a mile or two, our friend found that the shiny new five-frank piece was counterfeit, as false a thing as that manager's false smile. We had bucked the unbeatable system and we had lost. Earlier that same evening we spent a glum late in quarter of an hour in another cafe, one which owes its fame and most of its American customs to the happy circumstance that in a certain famous comic opera produced a few years ago a certain popular leading man sang a song extolling its fascinations. The man who wrote the song must have had a full-flowered and glamorous imagination, for he could see beauty where beauty was not. To us there seemed nothing particularly fanciful about the place except the prices they charged for refreshments. However, something unusual did happen there once. It was not premeditated, though. The proprietor had nothing to do with it. Had he known what was about to occur, undoubtedly he would have advertised it in advance and sold tickets for it. By reason of circumstances over which he had no control, but which had mainly to do with a locked-up wardrobe, an American of convivial mentality was in his room at his hotel one evening fairly consumed with loneliness. Above all things he desired to be abroad amid the life and gaiety of the French capital, but unfortunately he had no clothes except boudoir clothes and no way of getting any either which made the situation worse. He had already tried the telephone in a vain effort to communicate with a ready-made clothing establishment in the Rue Saint-Almer. Naturally he had failed as he knew he would before he tried. Among Europeans the telephone is not the popular and handy adjunct of everyday life it is among us. The English have small use for it because it is to start with a wretched Yankee invention. Besides an Englishman in a hurry takes a cab, as his father did before him, takes the same cab his father took if possible, and the Latin races dislike telephone conversations because all the gestures go to absolute waste. The French telephone resembles a dingus for curling the hair. You wrap it round your head, with one end near your mouth and the other end near your ear, and you yell in it a while and curse in it a while, and then you slam it down and go send a messenger. The hero of the present tale, however, could not send a messenger. The hotel people had their orders to the contrary from one who was not to be disobeyed. Finally in stark desperation, maddened by the sounds of sidewalk revelry that filtered up to him intermittently, he encased his feet in bedroom slippers, slid a dressing gown over his pajamas, and negotiated his successful escape from the hotel by means of a rear way. Once in the open he climbed into a handy cab and was driven to the cafe of his choice, it being the same cafe mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago. Through a side entrance he made a hasty and unhindered entrance into this place, not that they would have been barred under any circumstances in as much as he had brought a roll with him. A person with a cluster of currency on hand is always suitably dressed in Paris, no matter if he has nothing else on, and this man had brought much ready cash with him. He could have gone in fig-leafed like Eve, or fig leafless like September morn, it being remembered that as between these two, as popularity depicted, morn wears even less than Eve. So he whisked in handily, and when he had hidden the lower part of himself under a table, he felt quite at home and proceeded to have a large and full evening. From there entered another American, and by that mental telepathy which inevitably attracts like spirit to like spirit, he was drawn to the spot where the first American sat. He introduced himself as one feeling the need of congenital companionship, and they shook hands and exchanged names, and the first man asked the second man to be seated, so they sat together and had something together, and then something more together, and as the winged moments flew they grew momentarily more intimate. Suddenly the newcomer said, This seems a pretty lacrimose shop. Suppose we go elsewhere and look for some real doings. Your proposition interests me strangely, said the first man, but there are two reasons, both good ones, why I may not fare forth with you. Look under the table and you'll see them. The second man looked and comprehended, for he was a married man himself, and he grasped the other's hand in warm and comforting sympathy. Old man, he said, for they had already reached the old man stage. Don't let that worry you. Why, I've got more pants than any man with only one set of legs has any right to have. I've got pants that have never been warm. You stay right here and don't move until I come back. My hotel is just round the corner from here. No sooner said than done. He went in and in the surprisingly short time was back, bringing spare trousers with him. Beneath the shielding protection of the table draperies, the suckered one slipped them on, and they were a perfect fit. Now he was ready to go where adventure might await them. They tarried, though, to finish the last bottle. Over the rim of his glass the second man ventured an opinion on a topic of the day. Instantly the first man challenged him. It seemed to him inconceivable that a person with intelligence enough to have massed so many pairs of trousers should harbor such a delusion. He begged of his newfound friend to withdraw the statement, or at least to abate it. The other man was sorry, but he simply could not do it. He stood ready to concede almost anything else, but on this particular point he was adamant. In fact, adamant was in comparison with him as pliable as chewing taffety. Much as he regretted it, he could not modify his assertion by so much as one brief jot or one small tittle without violating the consistent principles of a consistent life. He felt that way about it. All his family felt that way about it. Then, sir, said the first man with rare dignity, I regret to wound your feelings, but my sensibilities are such that I cannot accept, even temporarily, the use of a pair of trousers from the lone collection of a person who entertains such false and erroneous conceptions. I have the pleasure, sir, of wishing you good night. With these words he shucked off the barred abillaments and slammed them into the abashed bosom of the obstinate stranger and went back to his captivity. Pantsless, it is true, but with his honor unimpaired. End of Section 30. Section 31 of Europe Revised. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Chapter 15. Symptoms of the Disease, Part 1. The majority of these all-night places in Paris are singularly and monotonously alike. In the early hours of the evening, the musicians rest from their labors. The regular habitues lay aside their air of professional abandon. With true French frugality, the lights burn dim and low. But anon sounds the signal from the front of the house. Strike up the band, here comes a sucker. Somebody resembling ready money has arrived. The lights flash on, the can canners take the floor, the garçons flit hither and yawn, and all is excitement. Enter the opulent American gentleman. Half a dozen functionaries greet him rapturously, bowing before his triumph in progress. Others relieve him of his hat and coat so that he cannot escape prematurely. A whole reception committee escorts him to a place of honor facing the dancing area. The natives of the quarter stand in rows in the background, drinking beer or nothing at all, but the distinguished stranger sits at a front table and is served with champagne and champagne only. It is inferior champagne, but because it is labeled American brute, whatever that may denote, and because there is a poster on the bottle showing the American flag in the correct colors, he pays several times its proper value for it. From far corners and remote recesses, corphes and court gestures swim forth to fawn on him, bask in his presence, glory in his smile, and sell him something. The whole thing is as mercenary as passing the hat. Cigarette girls, flower girls, and bonbon girls, postcard vendors, and confetti dispensers surround him impenetrabley, taking him front, rear, by the right flank in the left, and they shove their wares in his face and will not take no for an answer, but they will take anything else. Two years ago at a hunting camp in North Carolina, I thought I had met the creature with the most acute sense of hearing of any living thing. I referred to Pearl, the mare. Pearl was an elderly mare, white in color, and therefore known as Pearl. She was most gentle and kind. She was a reliable family animal too, had a colt every year, but in her affiliation she was a pronounced reactionary. She went through life listening for somebody to say woe. Her ears were permanently slanted backward on that very account. She belonged to the woe lodge, which has a large membership among humans. Writing behind Pearl, you uttered the talismanic word in the thinnest thread of a whisper and instantly she stopped. You could spell woe on your fingers and she would stop. You could take a pencil and a piece of paper out of your pocket and write down woe and she would stop, but compared with a sample assortment of these cabaret satellites, Pearl would have seemed as deaf as a post. Clear across a hundred foot dance hall, they catch the sound of a restless dollar turning over in the fob pocket of an American tourist. And they come a-running and get it. Under the circumstances it requires self-hypnotism of a high order and plenty of it to make an American think he is enjoying himself. Still, he frequently attains to that happy consummation. To begin with, is he not in gay parry? As it is familiarly called in Rome's center and all points west, he is. Has he not kicked over the traces and cut loose with intent to be oh so naughty for one naughty night of his life? Such are the facts. Finally, and herein lies the proof conclusive, he is spending a good deal of money and is getting very little in return for it. Well then, what better evidence is required? Anytime he is paying four or five prices for what he buys and does not particularly need it or want it after it is bought, the average American can delude himself into the belief that he is having a brilliant evening. This is a racial trait worthy of the scientific consideration of Professor Hugo Munsterberg and other students of our national psychology. So far, the Munsterberg School has overlooked it, but the Cannae Parisians have not. They long ago studied out every quirk and wriggle of it and capitalized it to their own purpose. Liberty, economy, frugality. There they are, everywhere blazoned forth. Liberty for you, economy and frugality for them. Could anything on earth be fairer than that? Even so, the rapturous reception accorded to a North American pales to a dim and flickery puniness alongside the perfect riot and whirlwind of enthusiasm, which marks the entry into an all night place of a South American. Time was when, to the French understanding, exuberant prodigality in the United States were termed synonymous. That time has passed. Of recent years, our young kinsmen from the sister republics near the equator and the horn have invaded Paris in numbers, bringing their impulsive temperaments and their bankrolls with them. Thanks to these young cattle kings, those callow-silver princes from Argentina and Brazil, from Peru and from Ecuador, a new and more gorgeous standard for money wasting has been established. You had thought, per chance, there was no right in ceremonial quite so impressive as a head waiter in a Fifth Avenue restaurant, squeezing the blood out of a semi-raw canvas bag in a silver duck press for a free spender from Butte or Pittsburgh. I, too, had thought that. But wait, just wait until you have seen a major d'otel on the Avenue de l'opera with the smile of the canary-fed cat on his face, standing just behind a hide in Tallow Baron or a guano duke from somewhere in far spaghetti land, watching this person as he wades into the fresh fruit, checking off on his fingers each blushing South African peach at two francs the bite and each purple cluster of hot-house grapes at one franc the grape. That spectacle, believe me, is worth the money every time. There is just one being whom the dwellers of the all-night quarter love and revere more deeply than they love a downy, squabbling scion of some rich South American family, and that is a large, broad, negro pugilist with a mouthful of gold teeth and a shirt front full of yellow diamonds. To an American, and especially to an American who was reared below Mason and Dixon's justly popular line, it is indeed edifying to behold a black heavyweight fourth raider from South Clark Street, Chicago, taking his ease in a smart café, entirely surrounded by worshipful boulevardiers, both male and female. Now, as I remarked at an earlier stage of these observations, there is another Paris besides this, a Paris of history, of art, of architecture, of literature, of refinement, a Paris inhabited by a people with a pride in their past, a pluck in their present, and a faith in their future, a Paris of kindly aristocrats, of thrifty, pious, plain people, a Paris of students and savants and scientists, of great actors and great scientists and great dramaticists. There is one Paris that might well be burned to its unclean roots, and another Paris that will be glorified in the minds of mankind forever. And it would be unfair to say that the Paris which comes flaunting its tinsel of voice and pinchback villainy in the casual tourist face is the real Paris, as it would be for a man from the interior of the United States to visit New York, and after interviewing one Bowery bouncer, one tenderloin cab man, and one Broadway ticket speculator to go back home and say he had met fit representatives of the predominant classes of New York society, and had found them unfit. Yes, it would be even more unfair, for the alleged gay life of New York touches at some point of contact or other the lives of most New Yorkers, whereas in Paris there are numbers of sane and decent folks who seem to know nothing except by hearsay of what goes on after dark in the Montmartre district. Besides, no man in the course of a short and crowded stay may hope to get under the skin of any community, great or small. He merely skims its surface cuticle. He sees no deeper than the pores and the hair roots. The arteries, the frame, the real tissue structure remain hidden to him. Therefore the pity seems all the greater that to the world at large, the bad Paris should mean all Paris. It is that other and more wholesome Paris which one sees, a light-hearted, good-natured, polite and courteous Paris when one, biting his time and choosing the proper hour and proper place, goes abroad to seek it out. For the stranger who does at least a part of his sightseeing after a rational and orderly fashion, there are pictures that will live in the memory always. The Madeline, with the flower market just alongside, the green and gold woods of the Bois de Boulogne, the grandstand of the race course at Longchamps on a fair afternoon in the autumn, the opera at night, the promenade of the Champs-Élysées on a Sunday morning after church, the gardens of the Tuileries, the wonderful circling plaza of the Place Vendôme, where one may spend a happy hour if the maniacal taxi drivers deign to spare one's life for so unaccountably long a period, the arcades of the Rue de Virelli with their exquisite shops where every other shop is a jeweler's shop and every jeweler's shop is just like every other jeweler's shop, which, in fact, ceases to cause wonder when one learns that, with a few notable exceptions, all these shops carry their wares on commission from the stocks of the same manufacturing jewelers, the old Île de la Cité with the second-hand bookstalls stretching along the quai, and the Seine placidly meandering between its man-made, man-ruled banks. Days spent here seem short days, but that may be due, in some part, to the difference between our time and theirs. In Paris, you know, the day ends five or six hours earlier than it does in America. The two palaces of fine arts are fine enough, and finer still, on beyond them, is the great Pente Alexandre III. But to my untutored instincts, all three of these, with their clumpings of flag standards and their grouping of marble allegories, which are so aching white to the eye in sunlight, seem overly suggestive of a world's fair as we know such things in America. Seeing them, I knew where the architects who designed the main approaches and the courts of honor for all their big expositions got their notions for color schemes and statuary effects. I liked better those two ancient triumphal arches of Saint-Martin and Saint-Denis on the Boulevard Saint-Denis, and much better, even then these, the tremendous sweep of the Place de la Concorde, which is one of the finest squares in the world, and the one with the grimest, bloodiest history, I reckon. The Paris to which all these things properly appertain is at its very best and brightest on a Sunday-Sunday afternoon in the parks, where well-to-do people drive or ride, and their children play among the trees under the eyes of nursemaids in the quaint costumes of Normandy, though for all I know it may be Picardy. Elsewhere in these parks, the not-so-well-to-do gathering great numbers, some drinking harmless syrupy drinks at the gay little refreshment kiosks, some packing themselves about the man who has tamed the tree sparrows until they come at his call and hive in chattering, fluttering swarms on his head and his arms and shoulders, some applauding a favorite game of the middle classes that is being played in every wide and open space. I do not know its name, could not find anybody who seemed to know its name, but this game is a kind of glorified battle door and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball, capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine. It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full-spade beard and a tremendous amount of speed and skill. If the ball gets lost in anybody's whiskers, I think it counts 10 for the opposing side, but I do not know the other rules. A certain indefinable, unmistakably gallic flavor or pecancy savers the life of the people. It disappears only when they cease to be their own natural selves. A woman novelist, American by birth, but a resident of several years in Paris, told me a story illustrative of this. The incident she narrowed was so typical that it could never have happened, except in Paris, I thought. She said she was one of a party who went one night to dine at a little café much frequented by artists and art students. The host was himself an artist of reputation. As they dined there entered a tall, gloomy figure of a man with a long, ugly face full of flexible wrinkles. Such a figure and such a face as instantly commanded their attention. This man slid into a seat at a table near their table and had a frugal meal. He had reached this stage of demi-tasse and cigarette when he laid down cup and cigarette and fetching a bit of cardboard and a crayon out of his pocket, began putting down lines and shadings. Between strokes he covertly studied the profile of the man who was giving the dinner party. Not to be outdone, the artist hauled out his drawing pad and pencil and made a quick sketch of the long-faced man. Both finished their jobs practically at the same moment and rising together with low bows, they exchanged pictures. Each had done a rattlingly good character of the other, and then, without a word having been spoken or a move made towards striking up an acquaintance, each man sat him down again and finished his dinner. End of Section 31. Section 32 of Europe Revised. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Europe Revised by Irvin S. Cobb. Chapter 15. Symptoms of the Disease, Part 2. The lone diner departed first. When the party at the other table had had their coffee, they went round the corner to a little circus, one of the common type of French circuses which are housed in permanent wooden buildings instead of under-tents. Just as they entered the premier clown in spangles and peek-cap, bounded into the ring. Through the coating of powder on it they recognized his wrinkly, mobile face. It was the sketch-making stranger whose handiwork they had admired not half an hour before. Hearing the tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown. His ears were painted bright red, the red ear is the inevitable badge of the French clown, and he had as a foil for his funding a comic countryman known in the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all comic countrymen in France. And though I knew only at second hand of his sketch-making abilities, I am willing to concede that he was the drullest master of pantomime I ever saw. On leaving the circus very naturally we went to the café where the first part of the little dinner comedy had been enacted. We encountered both artists, professional or amateur, of Black Lead and Bristol Board, but we met a waiter there who was an artist in his line. I ordered a cigar of him specifying that the cigar should be of a brand made in Havana and popular in the States. He brought one cigar on a tray. In size and shape, in general aspect, it seemed to answer the required specifications. The little belly band about its dark brown abdomen was certainly orthodox and regular, but no sooner had I lit it and taken a couple of puffs than I was seized with the conviction that something had crawled up that cigar and died. So I examined it more closely and I saw then that it was a bad French cigar artfully adorned about its middle with a second-hand band, which the waiter had picked up after somebody else had plucked it off one of the genuine articles and had treasured, no doubt, against the coming of some unsophisticated patron, such as I. And I doubt whether that could have happened anywhere except in Paris, either. That is just it, you see. Try as hard as you please to see the real Paris. The Paris of petty larceny and small, mean graft intrudes on you and takes a peck at your purse. Go where you will, you cannot escape it. You journey, let us assume, to the tomb of Napoleon, under the great dome that rises behind the wide-armed Hotel des Envelies. From a splendid rotunda you look down to where, craftily touched by the softened lights streaming in from high above, that great sarcophagus stands housing the bones of Bonaparte. And above the entrance to the crypt you read the words from the last will and testament of him who sleeps here. I desire that my ashes may repose on the banks of the Seine. Among the French people I have so well loved. And you reflect that he so well loved them that, to glut his lusting after power and yet more power, he led sundry hundreds of thousand of them to massacure and mutilation and starvation. But that is the way of the world, conquerors the world over, and has absolutely nothing to do with this tale. The point I'm trying to get at is, if you can gaze unmoved at this sepulcher you are clawed. And if you can get away from its vicinity without being held up and gouged by small grafters you are a wonder. Not tombs nor temples nor sanctuaries are safe from the profane and polluting feet of the buzzing plague of them. You journey miles away from this spot to the great cemetery of Père-la-Shez. You trudge past seemingly unending, constantly unfolding miles of monuments and mausoleums. You view the storied urns and animated busts that mark the final resting places of France's illustrious dead. And as you marvel that France should have had so many illustrious dead, and that so many of them at this writing should be so dead, out from behind in Musée's vault or Marshal Nez comes a snoopy, smirking wretch to pester you to the desperation that is red-eyed and homicidal with his picture postcards and his exquerable wooden carvings. You fight the persistent vermin off and flee for refuge to that shrine of every American who knows his Mark Twain. The joint grave, footnote, being French and therefore economical, those two are, as it were, splitting one tomb between them, of Hel-Loyzey and Abbey-Lard, footnote, popular tourist pronunciation, and lo, in the very shadow of it, there lurks a blood-brother to the first pest. I defy you to get out of that cemetery without buying something of no value from one or the other or both of them. The communists made their last stand in Père-la-Shez. So did I. They went down fighting, same here. They were licked to a frazzle. Ditto, ditto. Next, we will say, Notre-Dame draws you. Within you walk the clattering flags of its dim, long aisles, without you pier a loft to view its gargoyled water-spouts, leering down like nightmares caught in the very act of leering and congealing into stone. The spirit of the place possesses you. You congrup a vision of the little maid Esmeralda and the squat hunchback who dwelt in the tower above. And at the precise moment a foul bagabon pounces on you, with a wink that is in itself an insult and a smile that should earn for him a kick for every inch of its breadth. He draws from beneath his coat a set of nasty photographs, things which no decent man could look at without gagging and would not carry about with him on his person for a million dollars in cash. By threats and hard words you drive him off, seeing others of his kind drawing nigh you run away, with no particular destination in mind except to discover some spot, however obscure and remote, where the wicked cease from troubling and the weary may be at rest for a few minutes. You cross a bridge to the farther bank of the river and presently you find yourself, at least I found myself there, in one of the very few remaining quarters of old Paris as yet untouched by the scheme of improvement, that is wiping out whatever is medieval and therefore unsanitary and making it all over modern and slick and shiny. Losing yourself and with yourself your sense of the reality of things, you wander into a maze of tall, beetle-browed old houses with tiny windows that lower at you from under their dormered lids like costile eyes. Above, on the attic ledges, are boxes of flowers and coops where caged larks and linets pipe cherry snatches of song and dawn beyond between the eaves which bend toward one another like gossips who would swap whispered confidences is a strip of sky. Below are smells of age and dampness. And there is a rich, nutritious, garlicky smell too and against a jog in the wall a frowsy but picturesque rag picker is asleep on a pile of sacks with a big, sleek cat asleep on his breast. I do not guarantee the rag picker. He and his cat may have moved since I was there and saw them, although they had the look about them both of being permanent fixtures. You pass a little church, lulling and lopped with the weight of the years and through its doors you catch a vista of old pillars and soft half-lights and twinkling candles set upon the high altar. Not even the gym crackery with which the Latin races dress up their holy places and the graves of their dead can entirely dispel its abiding, fruiting air of peace and majesty. You linger a moment outside just such a tavern as a certain ragged poet of parts. Might have frequented the while he penned his versified inquiry which after all these centuries is not yet satisfactorily answered. Touching on the approximate whereabouts of the snows that fell yester year and the roses that bloomed yester week. Midway of a winding alley you come to an ancient wall with an ancient gate crowned with the half-effaced quarterings of an ancient house. And you halt, almost expecting that the rusted hinges will creak a warning and the wooden halves begrudgingly divide, and that from under the slewed arch will issue a most galant swashbuckler with his buckles all buckled and his swash swashing, hence the name. At this juncture you feel a touch on your shoulder. You spin on your heel, feeling at your hip for an imaginary sword. But is not, Master François-Villon, in tattered doublet with a sonnet? Nor yet is it a jaunty blade in silken cloak with a challenge. It is your friend of the obscene photograph collection. He has followed you all the way from nineteen-fourteen, clear back into the middle ages, biding his time and hoping you will change your mind about investing in his nasty wares. With your wife or your sister you visit the Louvre. You look on the winged victory and admire her classic, but somewhat bulky proportions, meantime saying to yourself that it certainly must have been a mighty hard battle to Lady One, because she lost her head in both arms in doing it. You tire of interminable portraits of the grand monarch, showing him grouped with his wife, the old-fashioned square upright, and his son, the baby grand, and his prime minister, the lyre, and his brother, the yellow clarinet, and the rest of the orchestra. You examine the space on the wall where Mona Lisa is or is not smiling her inscrutable smile, depending on whether the open season for Mona Lisa's has come or past. Wandering your weary way past the works of Rubens and miles of Titians and townships of Courats and ranges of Michelangeloes and quarter-sections of Raphaels, and government reserves of Leonardo da Vinci's, you stray off finally into a side passage to see something else, leaving your wife or your sister behind in one of the main galleries. You are gone only a minute or two, but returning you find her furiously, helplessly angry and embarrassed. And on inquiry you learn she has been enduring the ordeal of being ogled by a small, wormy looking creature who has gone without shaving for two or three years in a desperate endeavor to resemble a real man. One day somebody will take a squirt gun and a pint of insect powder and destroy these little hairy caterpillars who infest all parts of Paris and make it impossible for a respectable woman to venture on the streets unaccompanied. Let us, for the further adornment and final elaboration of the illustration, say that you are sitting at one of the small round tables which make mushroom beds under the awnings along the boulevards. All about you are French people, enjoying themselves in an easy and rational and inexpensive manner. As for yourself, all you desire is a quiet half hour in which to read your paper, sip your coffee, and watch the shifting panorama of street life. That emphatically is all you ask, merely that and a little privacy. Are you permitted to have it? You are not. Beggars beseech you to look on their afflictions. Sidewalk vendors cluster about you, and if you are smoking the spark of your cigar inevitably draws a full delegation of those moldy old whisk-ra-dos who follow the profession of collecting butts and quids. They hover about you, watchful as chicken-hawks, and their bleary eyes envy you for each puff you take, until you grow uneasy and self-reproachful under their glare, and your smoke is spoiled for you. Very few men smoke well before an audience, even an audience of their own selection. So before your cigars have finished you toss it away, and while it is yet in the air the watchers leap forward and squabble under your feet for the prize. Then the winner emerges from the scramble and departs along the sidewalk to seek his next victim, with the still-smoking trophy impaled on his steel-pointed tool of trade. In desperation you rise up from there and flee away to your hotel and hide in your room, and lock and double-lock the doors, and begin to study timetables with a view to quitting Paris on the first train leaving for anywhere. The only drawback to a speedy consummation of this happy prospect being that no living creature can fathom the meaning of French timetables. It is not so much the aggregate amount of which they have dispoiled you. It is the knowledge that every other person in Paris is seeking and planning to nick you for some, some, great or small. It is the realization, by reason of your ignorance of the language and the customs of the land, you are at their mercy, and they have no mercy, that, as Walter Potter so succinctly phrases it, that is what gets your goat, and gets it good. So you shake the dust from your feet, your own dust, not Paris's dust, and you depart per hired back for the station and per train from the station, and as the train draws away from the train shed you behold behind you two legends or inscriptions, repeated and reiterated everywhere on the walls of the French capital. One of them says, English spoken here, and the other says, liberty, economy, frugality. End of section 32.