y one of these death-ships on such a
day as this, nor believe, until the crash came, that it would drop down
destruction upon this dream city, all aglitter in gold and white, with all
its towers and spires clean-cut against the sky.

It was hard to think of death and war; because spring had come with
its promise of life. There was a thrill of new vitality throughout the
city. I seemed to hear the sap rising in the trees along the boulevards.
Or was it only the wind plucking at invisible harp-strings, or visible
telephone wires, and playing the spring song in Parisian ears?

In the Tuileries gardens, glancing aslant the trees, I saw the first
green of the year, as the buds were burgeoning and breaking into tiny
leaves. The white statues of goddesses--a little crumbled and
weather-stained after the winter--were bathed in a pale sunshine.
Psyche stretched out her arms, still half-asleep, but waking at the call
of spring. Pomona offered her fruit to a young student, who gazed at
her with his black hat pushed to the back of his pale forehead.

Womanhood, with all her beauty carved in stone, in laughing and
tragic moods, in the first grace of girlhood, and in full maturity, stood
poised here in the gardens of the Tuileries, and seemed alive and
vibrant with this new thrill of life which was pulsing in the moist earth
and whispering through the trees, because spring had come to Paris.

There was no doubt about it. The flower girls who had been early to
les Halles came up the rue Royale one morning with baskets full of
violets, so that all the street was perfumed as though great ladies
were passing and wafting scent in their wake. Even the old cocher
who drove me down the rue Cambon had put on a new white hat. He
had heard the glad tidings, this old wrinkled man, and he clacked his
whip to let others know, and gave the glad-eye--a watery, wicked old
eye--to half a dozen midinettes who came dancing along the rue St.
Honore. They knew without his white hat, and the clack of his whip.
The ichor of the air had got into their blood. They laughed without the
reason for a jest, and ran, in a skipping way, because there was the
spring-song in their feet.

Along the Champs Elysees there was the pathway of the sun.
Through the Arc de Triomphe there was a glamorous curtain of cloth
of gold, and arrows of light struck and broke upon the golden figures
of Alexander's Bridge. Looking back I saw the dome of the Invalides
suspended in spa