beside my carriage. In the
evening I went to the opera and wondered at the great stairway and at
the big auditorium, and still more at the poor performance I saw there
but which I accounted for by the fact that September is the dull season.

That first day was all thrills. The next was spent in arranging hours
for lessons, and collecting pension addresses from all my acquaintances,
as I saw that it would be impossible to do my work in a hotel. I set
bravely out on my hunt for a dwelling place. Prices have increased
considerably since those days, for at that time it was possible to get
very good board and lodging on the left bank of the Seine for five
francs a day. My professor, Jacques Bouhy, however, lived near the Arc
de Triomphe, and I wished to be within walking distance. I toiled up and
down a great many stairs, and peeped into a great many rooms without
finding what I sought. I could not bear to wait a day to begin working,
and was just a bit discouraged, when I had the good fortune to meet two
girls from home, who gave me the address of the pension where they had
stayed. I rushed off at once to see it, and found a very nice house of
several floors, situated in a _cite_, a sort of garden behind the first
row of houses on the street, so that its windows faced a view of trees
and flowerbeds with circular gravel walks around them, instead of
cobblestones.

The head of the pension was an old woman who looked like a Bourbon but
was really a bourgeoise. It was nearly noon when I arrived, but she was
still in a wonderful dressing gown of purple and yellow stripes, with
_chaussons_, cloth slippers, on her feet, and an elaborate coiffure of
dyed black hair above her yellow old face. She came to me in the salon,
a long narrow room with French windows framing tree-tops, the windows
and doors all hung with rose-red velvet which looked as if it had been
in place since the First Empire. There were sofas of rose, and chairs of
the same with black wooden rims, tables and mantel-pieces with thousands
of things on them, and an old-fashioned square piano in the corner.
Madame was most gracious, remembered the name of her former lodgers,
said they were _tres gentilles_, turned a neat compliment to the
American nation, and showed me the rooms herself.

I chose a back one of good size, nicely furnished and hung with a pretty
chintz. It had a _cabinet de toilette_, or large cupboard for washstand
and trunks, opening off it, and I was