sins
but remembered them with pleasure. They had the dully-polished,
slightly-battered look of a modern antique. The words "M'sieu, Madame"
rang from them as from bells. They were very alert, sitting, as it
were, on tiptoe, and their eyes hit one as one approached. They were
like spiders squatting in their little houses waiting for their daily
flies.

He found one who looked jolly and harmless, sympathetic indeed, and to
her, with a flourished hat, he approached. Said he, "Donnez-moi,
Madame, s'il vous plait, le _Daily Mail_." At the second repetition
the good lady smiled at him, a smile compounded of benevolence and
comprehension, and instantly, with a "V'la M'sieu," she handed him _The
New York Herald_. They had saluted each other, and he marched down the
road in delight, with his first purchase under his arm and his first
foreign conversation accomplished.

At that time everything had delighted him--the wide, well-lighted
Boulevard, the concierges knitting in their immense doorways, each
looking like a replica of the other, each seeming sister to a
kiosk-keeper or a cat. The exactly-courteous speech of the people and
their not quite so rigorously courteous manners pleased him. He
listened to the voluble men who went by, speaking in a haste so
breathless that he marvelled how the prepositions and conjunctions
stuck to their duty in so swirling an ocean of chatter. There was a
big black dog with a mottled head who lay nightly on the pavement
opposite the Square de l'Observatoire. At intervals he raised his lean
skull from the ground and composed a low lament to an absent friend.
His grief was respected. The folk who passed stepped sidewards for
him, and he took no heed of their passage--a lonely, introspective dog
to whom a caress or a bone were equally childish things: Let me alone,
he seemed to say, I have my grief, and it is company enough. There was
the very superior cat who sat on every window-ledge, winking at life.
He (for in France all cats are masculine by order of philology), he did
not care a rap for man or dog, but he liked women and permitted them to
observe him. There was the man who insinuated himself between the
tables at the Cafe, holding out postcard-representations of the
Pantheon, the Louvre, Notre Dame, and other places. From beneath these
cards his dexterous little finger would suddenly flip others. One saw
a hurried leg, an arm that shone and vanished, a bosom that fled shyly
again, an audacio