young travellers.  The little steamboats were still plying on the Seine and we took one at last for the trip that opens to one so much that is beautiful and interesting in architecture and history.  It was a lovely afternoon even for summer and we passed in and out under the superb arches of the bridges, beholding the noble apse of Notre Dame with the twin towers rising beyond, structures associated with grim events of the Revolution, the masonry of the quays and the master work of Haussmann who was then putting a new face upon the old city.  Now all was bright and no thought of danger entered our minds as we revelled in the pleasures of such an excursion.  At length as we stood on the deck we became aware that we were undergoing careful scrutiny from a considerable group who for the most part made up our fellow-passengers.  We had had no thought of ourselves as especially marked.  My clothes, however, had been made in Germany and had peculiarities no doubt which indicated as much.  I was fairly well grounded in French but had no practice in speaking.  In trying to talk French, my tongue in spite of me ran into German, which I had been speaking constantly for six months.  This was particularly the case if I was at all embarrassed; my face and figure, moreover, were plainly Teutonic and not Latin.  The French ascribed their disasters largely to the fact that German spies were everywhere prying into the conditions, and reporting every assailable point and element of weakness.  This belief was well grounded; the Germans probably knew France better than the French themselves and skilfully adapted their attacks to the lacks and negligences which the swarming spies laid bare.  The group, of whose scrutiny we had become aware, was made up of ouvriers and ouvrieres, the men in the invariable blouse, with dark matted hair and black eyes, sometimes with a ratlike keenness of glance as they surveyed us.  The women were roughly dressed, sometimes in sabots, with heads bare or surmounted by conical caps.  They belonged to the proletariat, the class out of which had come in the Reign of Terror the sans-culottes of evil memory and the tricoteuses who had sat knitting about the guillotine, the class which, within a few months, was again to set the world aghast as the mob of La Commune.  As we stood disconcerted by their intent gaze, they put their heads together and talked in low and rapid tones; then their spokesman approached us, a man of polite bearing but ominously stern.  He was not a clumsy fellow, but darkly forceful and direct, a man capable of a quick, desperate deed.  At the moment there was the grim tiger in their eyes and from the soft paw the swift protrusion of the cruel claw.  One thought of the wild revolutionary song, “Ca ca, ca ira, les aristocrats a la lanterne!” They were the children of the mob that had sung that song.  With a bow, the spokesman said:  “Messieurs, we think you are Germans and we wish to know if we