It is late when we enter the beuglant, and the place is crowded to suffocation and thick with tobacco smoke.  The hall is an immensely large one, with gleaming chandeliers, frescoed nymphs and cupids on the walls, a regular stage and a regular orchestra.  A venerable man in gray hair and spectacles saws away at the big bass; a long-haired, professor-looking person struggles laboriously with the piano; there are two violinists, a horn, a trombone, a flute and a flageolet.  On the wall is a placard where we read that the price for the first consommation is fifteen sous, but that subsequent consommations will be furnished at the ordinary price.  Consommation is the convenient word of cafes chantants for food or drink of any kind, and every visitor is forced by the rules of the place to “consume” something as his title to a seat.  Nothing is furnished more nearly approaching food than brandied cherries, but the drinks include all the noxious and innoxious beverages known to the French—­from coffee, sugar-water or tea to brandy, rum and absinthe.  In the list of the stronger drinks, a compound of sugar, lemon, hot water and whisky (which I believe I have heard mentioned under the name of punch in remote towns of Arkansas and Minnesota) is here known as “an American.”  The first time one hears the order, “Bring me an American, waiter, and let him be hot, mind you—­as hot as one can swallow him,” it is a little surprising.

Waiters move laboriously about among the legs of the audience, bearing salvers laden with wine, beer, Americans and bottles of water.  The audience is rough and ready; hats and caps are worn habitually; pipes are diligently smoked—­cigars are rare.  Women are seldom seen here, except upon the stage, where they sit in a semicircle in a somewhat formal manner, each holding a bouquet in her lap carefully wrapped round with white paper, each wearing flowers in her elaborately coiffe hair and in the folds of her silken skirts, and each with arms and shoulders bare.  From time to time these women come forward and sing—­songs not always strictly adapted to the family circle, perhaps.  But the favorite vocalist is a comic man, who emerges from behind the scenes in a grotesquely exaggerated costume—­an ill-fitting, long, green calico tail-coat, with a huge yellow bandana dangling from a rear pocket; a red cotton umbrella with a brass ring on one end and a glass hook on the other; light blue shapeless trousers; a flaming orange—­colored vest; a huge standing collar, and in his buttonhole a ridiculous artificial flower.  This type of comic singer is unknown in American concert-halls of any grade, though he is sometimes seen at the German concerts in the Bowery of the lowest class.  Here he is very cordially esteemed.  The ladies behind him yawn in a furtive manner under cover of their bouquets, but the audience is hilarious over him as he sings about his friend Thomas from the country, who came up to Paris to see the sights and shocked everybody by his dreadful manners.