n
drill-sergeant. Then out past level fields to little Vanves, with its
steep streets and its old gray church, and past the splendid grounds of
the Lycee beyond. The fat woman got down, her live fowl shrieking
protest to the movement, and the butcher's boy got down, too, so that
Ste. Marie was left alone upon the imperiale save for a snuffy old
gentleman in a pot-hat who sat in a corner buried behind the day's
_Droits de l'Homme_.

Ste. Marie moved forward once more and laid his arms upon the iron rail
before him. They were coming near. They ran past plum and apple orchards
and past humble little detached villas, each with a bit of garden in
front and an acacia or two at the gate-posts. But presently, on the
right, the way began to be bordered by a high stone wall, very long,
behind which showed the trees of a park, and among them, far back from
the wall beyond a little rise of ground, the gables and chimneys of a
house could be made out. The wall went on for perhaps a quarter of a
mile in a straight sweep, but half-way the road swung apart from it to
the left, dipped under a stone railway bridge, and so presently ended at
the village of Clamart.

As the tram approached the beginning of that long stone wall it began to
slacken speed, there was a grating noise from underneath, and presently
it came to an abrupt halt. Ste. Marie looked over the guard-rail and saw
that the driver had left his place and was kneeling in the dust beside
the car peering at its underworks. The conductor strolled round to him
after a moment and stood indifferently by, remarking upon the strange
vicissitudes to which electrical propulsion is subject. The driver,
without looking up, called his colleague a number of the most surprising
and, it is to be hoped, unwarranted names, and suddenly began to burrow
under the tram, wriggling his way after the manner of a serpent until
nothing could be seen of him but two unrestful feet. His voice, though
muffled, was still tolerably distinct. It cursed, in an unceasing
staccato and with admirable ingenuity, the tram, the conductor, the
sacred dog of an impediment which had got itself wedged into one of the
trucks, and the world in general.

Ste. Marie, sitting aloft, laughed for a moment, and then turned his
eager eyes upon what lay across the road. The halt had taken place
almost exactly at the beginning of that long stretch of park wall which
ran beside the road and the tramway. From where he sat he cou