French
for bag-pipe. It was the fashionable instrument of an epoch and the
_musettes_ played by the _grandes dames_ were elaborately decorated.
The word in time slunk into the dictionaries of musical terms as
descriptive of a drone bass. Many of Gluck's ballet airs bear the
title, _Musette_. Perhaps the bass was even performed on a
bag-pipe.... "_Mal frequente_" in Parisian _argot_ has a variety of
significations; in this particular instance it suggested _apaches_ to
me. A _bal_, for instance, attended by _cocottes_, _mannequins_, or
_modeles_, could not be described as _mal frequente_ unless one were
speaking to a boarding school miss, for all the public _bals_ in Paris
are so attended. No, the words spoken to me, in this connection, could
only mean _apaches_. The confusion of epochs began to invite my
interest and I wondered, in my mind's eye, how a Louis XIV _apache_
would dress, how he would be represented at a costume ball, and a
picture of a ragged silk-betrousered person, flaunting a plaid-bellied
instrument came to mind. An imagination often leads one violently
astray.

The two urchins were marching us through street after street, one of
them whistling that pleasing tune, _Le lendemain elle etait
souriante_. Dark passage ways intervened between us and our
destination: we threaded them. The cobble stones of the underfoot were
not easy to walk on for my companion, shod in high-heels from the
Place Vendome.... The urchins amused each other and us by capers on
the way. They could have made our speed walking on their hands, and
they accomplished at least a third of the journey this way. Of course,
I deluged them with large round five and ten _centimes_ pieces.

We arrived at last before a door in a short street near the Gare du
Nord. Was it the Rue Jessaint? I do not know, for when, a year later,
I attempted to re-find this _bal_ it had disappeared.... We could hear
the hum of the pipes for some paces before we turned the corner into
the street, and never have pipes sounded in my ears with such a shrill
significance of being somewhere they ought not to be, never but once,
and that was when I had heard the piper who accompanies the dinner of
the Governor of the Bahamas in Nassau. Marching round the porch of the
Governor's Villa he played _The Blue Bells of Scotland_ and _God Save
the King_, but, hearing the sound from a distance through the
interstices of the cocoa-palm fronds in the hot tropical night, I
could on