I forget where we were at the time, but I know that we had only to walk through the perpetual motion of Paris, across a bridge, and down a few steps on the other side, to find the little steamer that took us by the river to the Tower.  We might have gone by omnibus or by fiacre, but if we had we should never have known what a street the Seine is, sliding through Paris, brown in the open sun, dark under the shadowing arches of the bridges, full of hastening comers and goers from landing-place to landing-place, up and down.  It gave us quite a new familiarity with the river, which had been before only a part of the landscape, and one of the things that made Paris imposing.  We saw that it was a highway of traffic, and that the little, brisk, business-like steamers were full of people, who went about in them because it was the cheapest and most convenient way, and not at all for the pleasure of a trip by water.  We noticed, too, a difference in these river-going people.  Some of them carried baskets, and some of them read the Petit Journal, and they all comfortably submitted to the good-natured bullying of the mariner in charge.  There were elderly women in black, with a button or two off their tight bodices, and children with patched shoes carrying an assortment of vegetables, and middle-aged men in slouch hats, smoking tobacco that would have been forbidden by public statute anywhere else.  They all treated us with a respect and consideration which we had not observed in the Avenue de l’Opera, and I noticed the Senator visibly expanding in it.  There was also a man and a little boy, and a dog, all lunching out of the same basket.  Afterward, on being requested to do so, the dog performed tricks—­French ones—­to the enjoyment and satisfaction of all three.  There was a great deal of politeness and good feeling, and if they were not Capi and Remi and Vitalis in “Sans Famille,” it was merely because their circumstances were different.

As we stood looking at the Eiffel Tower, poppa said he thought if he were in my place he wouldn’t describe it.  “It’s old news,” he said, “and there’s nothing the general public dislike so much as that.  Every hotel-porter in Chicago knows that it’s three hundred metres high, and that you can see through it all the way up.  There it is, and I feel as if I’d passed my boyhood in its shadow.  That way I must say it’s a disappointment.  I was expecting it to be more unexpected, if you understand.”

Momma and I quite agreed.  It had the familiarity of a demonstration of Euclid, and to the non-engineering mind was about as interesting.  The Senator felt so well acquainted with it that he hesitated about buying a descriptive pamphlet.  “They want to sell a stranger too much information in this country,” he said.  “The meanest American intelligence is equal to stepping into an elevator and stepping out again.”  But he bought one nevertheless, and was particularly pleased with it, not only because it was the cheapest thing in Paris at five cents, but because, as he said himself, it contained an amount of enthusiasm not usually available at any price.