like the night calls of monster birds flitting over the city. The
air was vibrant with these wild calls. We were an hour waiting there
in the gloom for a conveyance. But when we left the wide square
about the station, and came into the streets of Paris, we understood
why the auto horns were bellowing so. For the automobiles were
running lickety-split through the darkness without lights and
the howls of their horns pierced the night. The few street lights
burning a low candle power at the intersections of the great
boulevards were hooded and cast but a pale glow on the pavements.
And as we rode from our station and passed the Tuileries and the
Rue de Rivoli, save for the dim outline of the iron railings of
the Gardens ten feet from our cab window, we had no sign to mark
our way. Yet our cab whizzed along at a twenty-five mile gait,
and every few seconds a great blatting devil would honk out of the
darkness, and whirl past us, and sometimes we would be abreast of
another and the fiendish horns of us would go screaming in chorus
as we raced and passed and repassed one another on the broad street.
The din was nerve racking--but highly Parisian. One fancied that
Paris, being denied its lights, made up its quota of sensation by
multiplying its sound!

We went to the Ritz--now smile; the others did! Not that the Ritz
is an inferior hotel. We went there because it was really the
grandee among Paris hotels. Yet every day we were in Paris when
we told people we were at the Ritz, they smiled. The human mind
doesn't seem to be able to associate Henry and me with the Ritz
without the sense of the eternal fitness of things going wapper-jawed
and catawampus. We are that kind of men. Wichita and Emporia
are written large and indelibly upon us; and the Ritz, which is
the rendezvous of the nobility, merely becomes a background for