nd he'd
make after his riotous years! But he had a friend, recently detailed to
the yard, and warmly recommended by the boson's mate, this friend Harty,
chief wireless operator, soon came to be the most regular of all the
Saturday night attendants at old Perrault's store. It was on Saturday
nights that the unmarried foreman on the breakwater job came up to see
old Perrault. If you stood well with the old fellow, like as not he
would ask you to the house of a Sunday afternoon, and then you could sit
around and rest your eyes on the lovely Claire while she played the
piano.

One might think that old Perrault, who so casually picked his company,
was a careless sort of parent; but not so, as witness his questioning of
Baldwin, when it began to dawn on him that this wireless operator was
becoming a distinguished member of the Sunday afternoon parties; and the
boson's mate, who revered old Perrault, but who also thought a lot of
his friend Harty, spoke judiciously.

"He's all right," he replied to old Perrault, "all right. Yes, I know he
used to drink an' was generally wild once; but he's over that. Oh, sure,
all over that now."

It was beginning to look like Harty for Perrault's son-in-law, when
Bowen came along. Bowen was the expert who came to overhaul the wireless
plant in the yard. An easy-going, but wide-awake sort, Bowen, who
seemed to have been everywhere and who could talk of where he had been,
talk without end, and always with the intimate little touches which you
never found in the guidebooks. He captured old Perrault at the first
assault. Old Perrault from behind his counter happening to catch a stray
word, listened, looked up, and, noting the animated features, hastily
signalled the new-comer to come out of the crowd. One minute later he
had put the vital question: Had Mr. Bowen ever been to Paris?

To Paris! Bowen started to touch the end of a finger for every time he
had been to Paris. Old Perrault could not wait for him to finish. "And
the Champs Elysees, Mister Bowen, you have been there?"

"The Champs Elysees? If I had a dollar, M'sieu Perrault--"

"Eh?" The old man wanted to hear him say that "M'sieu" in just that way
again--"if you had one dollar, Mister Bowen?"

Bowen understood. "Yes, if I had a dollar, M'sieu, for every time I sat
on one of those chairs inside the sidewalk--in under the trees, you
know, M'sieu--and watched the autos go by! Talk about autos!--there's
the place for autos, coming d