a shot you had to allow for the curve or you would infallibly put the “English” on the wrong side of the hall.  Dan was to mark while the doctor and I played.  At the end of an hour neither of us had made a count, and so Dan was tired of keeping tally with nothing to tally, and we were heated and angry and disgusted.  We paid the heavy bill—­about six cents—­and said we would call around sometime when we had a week to spend, and finish the game.

We adjourned to one of those pretty cafes and took supper and tested the wines of the country, as we had been instructed to do, and found them harmless and unexciting.  They might have been exciting, however, if we had chosen to drink a sufficiency of them.

To close our first day in Paris cheerfully and pleasantly, we now sought our grand room in the Grand Hotel du Louvre and climbed into our sumptuous bed to read and smoke—­but alas!

          It was pitiful,
          In a whole city-full,
          Gas we had none.

No gas to read by—­nothing but dismal candles.  It was a shame.  We tried to map out excursions for the morrow; we puzzled over French “guides to Paris”; we talked disjointedly in a vain endeavor to make head or tail of the wild chaos of the day’s sights and experiences; we subsided to indolent smoking; we gaped and yawned and stretched—­then feebly wondered if we were really and truly in renowned Paris, and drifted drowsily away into that vast mysterious void which men call sleep.

CHAPTER XIII.

The next morning we were up and dressed at ten o’clock.  We went to the ‘commissionaire’ of the hotel—­I don’t know what a ‘commissionaire’ is, but that is the man we went to—­and told him we wanted a guide.  He said the national Exposition had drawn such multitudes of Englishmen and Americans to Paris that it would be next to impossible to find a good guide unemployed.  He said he usually kept a dozen or two on hand, but he only had three now.  He called them.  One looked so like a very pirate that we let him go at once.  The next one spoke with a simpering precision of pronunciation that was irritating and said: 

“If ze zhentlemans will to me make ze grande honneur to me rattain in hees serveece, I shall show to him every sing zat is magnifique to look upon in ze beautiful Parree.  I speaky ze Angleesh pairfaitemaw.”

He would have done well to have stopped there, because he had that much by heart and said it right off without making a mistake.  But his self-complacency seduced him into attempting a flight into regions of unexplored English, and the reckless experiment was his ruin.  Within ten seconds he was so tangled up in a maze of mutilated verbs and torn and bleeding forms of speech that no human ingenuity could ever have gotten him out of it with credit.  It was plain enough that he could not “speaky” the English quite as “pairfaitemaw” as he had pretended he could.