prelates; shabby young priests; cavalrymen in casque and cuirass;
workingmen turned horse and harnessed to carts; sidewalk jesters,
itinerant vendors of questionable wares; shady loafers dressed to
resemble gold-showering America; motor-cyclists in leather; hairy
musicians, blue gendarmes, baggy red zouaves; purple-faced, glazed-
hatted, scarlet-waistcoated, cigarette-smoking cabmen, calling one
another "onions," "camels," and names even more terrible. Women
prevalent over all the concourse; fair women, dark women, pretty women,
gilded women, haughty women, indifferent women, friendly women, merry
women. Fine women in fine clothes; rich women in fine clothes; poor
women in fine clothes. Worldly old women, reclining befurred in electric
landaulettes; wordy old women hoydenishly trundling carts full of
flowers. Wonderful automobile women quick-glimpsed, in multiple veils of
white and brown and sea-green. Women in rags and tags, and women draped,
coifed, and befrilled in the delirium of maddened poet-milliners and the
hasheesh dreams of ladies' tailors.

About the procession, as it moves interminably along the boulevard, a
blue haze of fine dust and burnt gasoline rises into the sunshine like
the haze over the passages to an amphitheatre toward which a crowd is
trampling; and through this the multitudes seem to go as actors passing
to their cues. Your place at one of the little tables upon the sidewalk
is that of a wayside spectator: and as the performers go by, in some
measure acting or looking their parts already, as if in preparation, you
guess the roles they play, and name them comedians, tragedians,
buffoons, saints, beauties, sots, knaves, gladiators, acrobats, dancers;
for all of these are there, and you distinguish the principles from the
unnumbered supernumeraries pressing forward to the entrances. So, if you
sit at the little tables often enough--that is, if you become an amateur
boulevardier--you begin to recognise the transient stars of the pageant,