onc. Une heure vient de sonner."

* * * * *

There came a brief interruption. Into our street's procession one
evening, over its round cobblestones on a bicycle that wearily wobbled,
there came a lean dusty figure with something distinctly familiar in the
stoop of the big shoulders.

"Hello, boys," said a deep gruff voice.

"J. K.!"

It was. Joe Kramer arriving in Paris at midnight on a punctured tire,
and cursing the cobblestone pavements over which he had hunted us out.

A hot supper, a bottle of wine, a genial beam on all three of us, and
Joe told his story. After leaving college, from New York he had gone to
Kansas City, and by the "livest paper" there he had been sent abroad
with a bike to do a series of "Sunday specials." He had come over
steerage and written an expose of his passage. He had two weeks for
Paris and then was off to Berlin and Vienna.

"I'm just breaking ground this time, boys," he said. "I want to get the
hang of the countries and a start in their infernal languages."

The next day he began to break ground in our city. Early the next
morning I found Joe propped up in bed scowling into _Le Matin_ as he
tried to butt his way through the language into the news events of the
day. What I tried to tell him of the Paris I had found made no appeal
whatever.

"All right, Kid," he said indulgently. "If I had a dozen lifetimes I
might be a poet. But I haven't, so I'll just be a reporter."

And he and his bike plunged into the town. He found its "newspaper row"
that day and a Frenchman to whom he had a letter. With this man Joe went
to the Bourse and that night to the Chamber of Deputies. He got "Sunday
specials" out of them both, and then went on to the Bourse de Travail.
And in the few spare moments he had, Joe told us of the things he had
seen. Rumors of war and high finance, trade unions, strikes and sabotage
burst on my startled artist's ears. It made me think of the harbor!
_This_ was not my Paris!

"It is," said J. K. stoutly. "There's no place like a newspaper office
to put you right next to the heart of a town."

He would not hear to our seeing him off. I remember him that last night
after supper strapping his bag onto his bike and starting off down our
quiet old street on his way to the station.

"To-morrow," he said, "I'll stop off in Leipsic. I want to have a look
at the college that stirred my young grandfather up for life. I've got
his diary with me.