and the faces one passes are indistinguishable. As for the numbers
of the houses, no one thinks of looking for them. If you know the
quarter you count doors from the corner, or try to puzzle out the
familiar outline of a balcony or a pediment; if you are in a strange
street, you must ask at the nearest tobacconist's--for, as for
finding a policeman, a yard off you couldn't tell him from your
grandmother!

Such, after six months of war, are the nights of Paris; the days are
less remarkable and less romantic.

Almost all the early flush and shiver of romance is gone; or so at
least it seems to those who have watched the gradual revival of
life. It may appear otherwise to observers from other countries,
even from those involved in the war. After London, with all her
theaters open, and her machinery of amusement almost unimpaired,
Paris no doubt seems like a city on whom great issues weigh. But to
those who lived through that first sunlit silent month the streets
to-day show an almost normal activity. The vanishing of all the
motorbuses, and of the huge lumbering commercial vans, leaves many a
forgotten perspective open and reveals many a lost grace of
architecture; but the taxi-cabs and private motors are almost as
abundant as in peace-time, and the peril of pedestrianism is kept at
its normal pitch by the incessant dashing to and fro of those
unrivalled engines of destruction, the hospital and War Office
motors. Many shops have reopened, a few theatres are tentatively
producing patriotic drama or mixed programmes seasonal with
sentiment and mirth, and the cinema again unrolls its eventful
kilometres.