eyes were deeply set about two-thirds of the way back
toward his head and with one listless claw he picked at the serviette.
The summons was very near; the dread inevitable impended.

Sunday night he was still present, but in a greatly altered state.
During the preceding twenty-four hours his brave spirit had fled. They
had boiled him then; so now, instead of being green, he was a bright
and varnished red all over, the exact colour of Truck Six in the
Paducah Fire Department.

We felt that we who had been sympathisers at the bedside during some
of his farewell moments owed it to his memory to assist in the last
sad rites. At a perfectly fabulous price we bought the departed and
undertook to give him what might be called a personal interment; but
he was a disappointment. He should have been allowed to take the veil
before misanthropy had entirely undermined his health and destroyed
his better nature, and made him, as it were, morbid. Like Harry Leon
Wilson's immortal Cousin Egbert, he could be pushed just so far, and
no farther.

Before I left Paris the city was put upon bread cards. The country at
large was supposed to be on bread rations too; but in most of the
smaller towns I visited the hotel keepers either did not know about
the new regulation or chose to disregard it. Certainly they generally
disregarded it so far as we were concerned. For all I know to the
contrary, though, they were restricting their ordinary patrons to the
ordained quantities and making an exception in the case of our people.
It may have been one of their ways of showing a special courtesy to
representatives of an allied race. It would have been characteristic
of these kindly provincial innkeepers to have done just that thing.

Likewise, one could no longer obtain cheese in a first-grade Paris
restaurant or aboard a French dining car, though cheese was to be had
in unstinted quantity in the rural districts and in the Paris shops;
and, I believe, it was also procurable in the cafes of the Parisian
working classes, provided it formed a part of a meal costing not more
than five francs, or some such sum. In a first-rate place it was, of
course, impossible to get any sort of meal for five francs, or ten
francs either; especially after the ten per cent luxury tax had been
tacked on.

In March prices at the smarter cafe eating places had already
advanced, I should say, at least one hundred per cent above the
customary pre-war rates; and by midsum