straight, white hair that stood from her head uncannily stiff.

"But the demoiselle wishes to appear a boy, un petit garcon?" she
inquired, gazing eagerly at Flo's long, slender frame. Her voice
was old and thin, like the high quavering of an imperfect
tuning-fork, and her eyes were sharp as talons in their grasping
glance.

"Mademoiselle does not wish such a costume," gruffly responded
Mephisto.

"Ma foi, there is no other," said the ancient, shrugging her
shoulders. "But one is left now; mademoiselle would make a fine
troubadour."

"Flo," said Mephisto, "it's a dare-devil scheme, try it; no one
will ever know it but us, and we'll die before we tell. Besides,
we must; it's late, and you couldn't find your crowd."

And that was why you might have seen a Mephisto and a slender
troubadour of lovely form, with mandolin flung across his
shoulder, followed by a bevy of jockeys and ballet girls,
laughing and singing as they swept down Rampart Street.

When the flash and glare and brilliancy of Canal Street have
palled upon the tired eye, when it is yet too soon to go home to
such a prosaic thing as dinner, and one still wishes for novelty,
then it is wise to go into the lower districts. There is fantasy
and fancy and grotesqueness run wild in the costuming and the
behaviour of the maskers. Such dances and whoops and leaps as