void impoverishment in a foreign land, she should
not repeat the story nor the experiment. But I simply offer it as a
fact, and to an American, at home or abroad, a novel one.

I owe to these little figures another experience quite as strange.
It was at the close of a dull winter's day,--a day from which all
out-of-door festivity seemed to be naturally excluded: there was a
baleful promise of snow in the air and a dismal reminiscence of it under
foot, when suddenly, in striking contrast with the dreadful bleakness
of the street, a half dozen children, masked and bedizened with cheap
ribbons, spangles, and embroidery, flashed across my Spion. I was quick
to understand the phenomenon. It was the Carnival season. Only the night
before I had been to the great opening masquerade,--a famous affair, for
which this art-loving city is noted, and to which strangers are drawn
from all parts of the Continent. I remember to have wondered if
the pleasure-loving German in America had not broken some of his
conventional shackles in emigration; for certainly I had found the
Carnival balls of the "Lieder Kranz Society" in New York, although
decorous and fashionable to the American taste, to be wild dissipations
compared with the practical seriousness of this native performance, and
I hailed the presence of these children in the open street as a promise
of some extravagance, real, untrammelled, and characteristic. I seized
my hat and--OVERCOAT,--a dreadful incongruity to the spangles that had
whisked by, and followed the vanishing figures round the corner. Here
they were re-enforced by a dozen men and women, fantastically, but not
expensively arrayed, looking not unlike the supernumeraries of some
provincial opera troupe. Following the crowd, which already began to
pour in from the side-streets, in a few moments I was in the broad,
grove-like allee, and in the midst of the masqueraders.

I remember to have been told that this was a characteristic annual
celebration of the lower classes, anticipated with eagerness, and
achieved with difficulty, indeed, often only through the alternative of
pawning clothing and furniture to provide the means for this ephemeral
transformation. I remember being warned, also, that the buffoonery was
coarse, and some of the slang hardly fit for "ears polite." But I am
afraid that I was not shocked at the prodigality of these poor people,
who purchased a holiday on such hard conditions; and, as to the
coarsenes