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is to-day-and ever shall be. Hawthorne the Boul' Mich' that revelry reigns of an enjoyed the book-stalls-though I suspect evening (exceptional evenings aside); the he took more pleasure in the hours he spent tide of dissipation runs never so strongly browsing at Mr. Young's, in Liverpool, not toward Montmartre, where vineyards used too far from the Custom-house-and he to stretch. There one attends the Moulin tried, too, to enjoy the bustling streets and Rouge-naughty no longer, simply dull, their life, so different from anything in and given up to comic opera of American Salem. But he tells us nothing of the make; there one finds the Bal Tabarin in laundry-boats, which stood there long be- full swing, and all the cafés noctambules. fore he paid his visit to the bridges; or of And a gay place of an evening is the Avenue the baths one comes on everywhere, and Clichy, where the merry-go-round is runthe pretentious "Schools of Natation." ning and arc-lights blaze and loud music We take them all in for our two sous' fare; assails one from afar. and for us, at least, passengers on the "flyboat," the Seine remains what Pascal called it centuries ago: the city's moving highway. Neither Napoleon the Less nor the Baron Haussmann could "improve" it out of existence. One thoroughfare, at least, is left. In the Latin Quarter, for all it is so pleasant to overhear the flower-women's chaff (flower-women are old and ugly here, as always and everywhere off the stage and out of novels), this is not too true. The Boulevard St. Michel, though it call to mind the half-forgotten tales of Murgertales of different streets, but of the same abiding types-is but a modern thing; the Boulevard St. Germain was pierced at the cost of old streets and old houses innumerable. What the Empire left, the Republic is tearing away: in the Rue St. Jacques, for example. And the changes are in the students as well as in the student quarter: today they shave sometimes, and sometimes wash. Is it the coming of the Anglo-Saxon that has impaired the picturesqueness of it all, and given a student's tailor and barber almost as much importance as his mistress; or is it the co-educational régime at the Sorbonne, and even in the studios? Call it but evolution, if you like. It is more to the point that the Latin Quarter of our day is overstocked with polite pensions where the Englishwoman and the American girl predominate; one has but to go to the corner grocery to find American soap, and no further than the boulevard to buy this very magazine. The American Girls' Club is in the Rue Chevreuse, hard by; and the Restaurant Coopératif, administered by students at the University, seems to be modelled on Randall Hall, at Harvard. Even the cafés are changed in these days of progress-far more alimentary they are han literary. It is no longer in

VOL. XLV.-60

Such are not all the streets of Paris. Not every quarter on the right bank is as garish as the Avenue Clichy or as cosmopolitan as the Avenue de l'Opera. There are sections of the Rue des Francs Bourgeois where one finds himself in some old town far from the modern capital; in the Marais one may hear the hurrying feet of Dickens's "Tale." They are not the feet of those who shall enter our lives-rather the hurrying footsteps of those who have already passed our way and, through ages now past, entered it. When the saunterer walks old Paris by night, let him be no more heedful of Apaches than ready for the echoing tread of the heroes of the temps d'antan. In the darkness of the quarter, why, you ask yourself, are not the lackeys of Ninon, of Gabrielle and of the Montespan (you think little of chronology at these moments) lighting their mistresses to coaches or to sedans? But, hark! the petits violons are playing in the hotel that we call Carnavalet; Molière's "Georges Dandin " is acted this evening for Madame de Sévigné's guests. And these great mansions that one passes are noble dwellings all-neither factories nor shabby tenements now that darkness has fallen upon them. The illusion passes, and there are no more hurrying, echoing footsteps; there is silence in salon and in street that were but now the scene of a glorious, mad masquerade: a dance of ghosts through our historical imagination.

For the streets of Paris are a stage-set sometimes to a melodrama, or to a pageant such as Nodier's fantasy, or ours, has figured; more often to a comedy wherein the unities are outraged and the mob amused. As in some Elizabethan piece, we who sit to it may be spectators and players too; it is from our café table on the pavement-if we stay not too long-that the piece is best

followed and is best enjoyed. In London, where the play is more spectacular, with less of human interest and more emphasis upon the “properties," we prefer to take a 'bus-top seat. Here we may face the 'busstand, if we like; the 'bus-stand, where they are watering their cattle and calling the numbers for another circuit. A handful of copper buys us all this: with our bock thrown in. And if the play which Paris improvises for us fail to amuse, there is the beer at least; and the café newspaper, and the stationery to write a letter home on-if not this article. All these small perquisites come with our fauteuil d'orchestre in the open-air theatre of the boulevard. The dialogue was better at Furetière's cabaret or in Voltaire's time; but the music of the comedy—the orchestra wears tight red coatsis well enough to-day; so, too, the action. Even in the quarters of the poor-Paris is not all holiday nor all Boulevard des Italiens-the street sends up accompaniment to the piece that is always playing: the comédie humaine. The glazier calls his Ho... vitrier, ho! the vegetable-women cry their potatoes and water-cresses; the fish-wife plaintively comments, Ah, qu'il est donc bon, le maquereau! There is ever a diversion on some penny whistle.

It is in rendering the movement of the Paris types and scenes-not in competing with the window-dressers of the Bon Marché or those who copy costumes for a poster-that George Wright has in his sketch-book caught the essence of the eternal comedy. And it is in the humanness of even the superficial life of Paris-of France, too, if you will-that resides one part of the great charm which the resident cannot describe, but snaps a finger over, with a word of an indefinable something. Every Frenchman is, with Gautier, one for whom the visible world exists-for in France it can hardly escape one. But it is the humanness of it all to which, and, often, for which, one comes back; and life moves pleasantly in all the minor details that make it up. "They are tragic and charming, our streets; they should suffice for any poet." Although even the narrowest and oldest of them has its juggernaut-its swaying motor busses-there remains here street-movement over against mere motion: the people one sees are of the street, not merely in it. The flâneur keeps his place at the little round table till his cigar is smoked down to its last half-inch. This is to linger-to loiter-instead of struggling to arrive.

IN THE OASIS

By G. E. Woodberry

It was a paradise of trees

In the blue vague of sand and sea;

An isle of ocean histories,

An unknown isle, it seemed to me;

A precinct of the ancient grove,

Sacred to fruit and corn and peace;

Old as the spring of life and love,

It seemed a bank where time might cease.

It was a tract of sky and palm

Where yellowing waters ooze and run, And dark folk dwell amid the calm

Of earthen shadows red and dun;

They brought me gourds of liquor pale
The cut palm yields at break of dawn;

In hearts so simple could not fail

The kindness out of nature drawn.

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