thousand times; "Ciel, comme il fait chaud!" and slapped the hands of
beaky-nosed young men with white slips beneath their waistcoats
and shiny boots and other symbols of a high civilization. Americans in
Panama hats sauntered down the Rue de Rivoli, staring in the shop
windows at the latest studies of nude women, and at night went in
pursuit of adventure to Montmartre, where the orchestras at the Bal
Tabarin were still fiddling mad tangoes in a competition of shrieking
melody and where troops of painted ladies in the Folies Bergères still
paraded in the promenoir with languorous eyes, through wafts of
sickly scent. The little tables were all along the pavements of the
boulevards and the terrasses were crowded with all those bourgeois
Frenchmen and their women who do not move out of Paris even in
the dogdays, but prefer the scenery of their familiar streets to that of
Dieppe and Le Touquet. It was the same old Paris--crowded with
Cook's tourists and full of the melody of life as it is played by the hoot
of motor horns, the clang of steam trams, the shrill-voiced camelots
shouting "La Presse! La Presse!" and of the light laughter of women.

Then suddenly the thunderbolt fell with its signal of war, and in a few
days Paris was changed as though by some wizard's spell. Most of
the children vanished from the Tuileries gardens with their white-
capped nurses, and the sparrows searched in vain for their bird man.
Punch gave a final squawk of dismay and disappeared when the
theatre of the Petit Guignol was packed up to make way for a more
tragic drama. A hush fell upon Montmartre, and the musicians in its
orchestras packed up their instruments and scurried with scared
faces--to Berlin, Vienna, and Budapesth. No more boats went up to
Sèvres and St. Cloud with crowds of pleasure-seekers. The Seine
was very quiet beneath its bridges, and in the Pavilion Bleu no dainty
creatures sat sipping rose-tinted ices or slapped the hands of the