And she is so prodigal of her treasures, this goodly city!  She lavishes them on all comers without fee or favor.  All day long her princely art-galleries stand open to welcome the passing visitor.  One comes and goes unhindered and unquestioned in church or museum, and even the service of guides and boats and cars to the sewers, and of official guides to the Catacombs, is given without compensation—­nay more, all fees are strictly; forbidden.  There is no city on earth that receives its guests with such splendid and lavish hospitality.  Apart from one’s board and lodging, it is possible for a stranger to come to Paris and to visit all its principal sights without the expenditure of a single sou.  And for the persons who, prolonging their stay, wish in some sort to take up their permanent residence in Paris, things are smoothed and ironed and the knots picked out in the most wonderful way.  Your board is dainty and your bed soft.  Velvet-footed and fairy-handed beings minister to your wants.  You are clothed as if by magic in garments of marvelous beauty.  The very rustle of your letter of credit is as an open sesame to treasure-chambers to which Ali Baba’s cavern was but a shabby cellar.  And if, on the contrary, your means are limited and your wants but few, the science of living has been so exactly conned and is so perfectly understood that your franc-piece will buy you as many necessaries as ever your fifty-cent greenback did home, and that, too, in face of the fact that all provisions are now, owing to the war and the taxes, as dear, if not dearer than they are in Philadelphia.  If a stranger comes to Paris and wishes to live comfortably and economically, there are plenty of respectable, well-situated establishments in the best section of the city where he can obtain a comfortable, well-furnished room and well-cooked, well-served meals, for eight to ten francs a day—­such accommodations as five dollars would scarcely avail to purchase in Philadelphia or New York.

The whole secret of the matter is, that in France everybody understands the art of making the most out of everything.  No scrap of food is wasted, no morsel cast aside, till every particle of nourishment it can yield is carefully extracted.  The portions given to the guests at the minor hotels, where one lives en pension at so much per diem, are carefully measured for individual consumption.  The slice of steak, the tiny omelette, the minute moulded morsels of butter, even the roll of bread and little sucrier and cream-jug placed before each person, have each been carefully gauged as to the usual dimensions of an ordinary appetite.  Nothing is squandered and nothing is wasted.  When one recalls the aspect of our hotel tables at home—­the bread-plates left with their piles of cold, uneatable corn-bread, and heavy, chilled muffins and sodden toast uneaten, uncared-for and wasted; the huge steak, with its scrap of tenderloin carefully scolloped out, and the rest left to be thrown away;