Paris was no paradise to one American at least.  Yet the mere change of air and sky, and the escape from that sooty, all-pervasive, chimney-flue smell of London, was so sudden and complete, that the first hour of Paris was like a refreshing bath, and gave rise to satisfaction in which every pore of the skin participated.  My room at the hotel was a gem of neatness and order, and the bed a marvel of art, comfort, and ease, three feet deep at least.

Then the uniform imperial grace and eclat of the city was a new experience.  Here was the city of cities, the capital of taste and fashion, the pride and flower of a great race and a great history, the city of kings and emperors, and of a people which, after all, loves kings and emperors, and will not long, I fear, be happy without them,—­a gregarious, urbane people, a people of genius and destiny, whose God is Art and whose devil is Communism.  London has long ago outgrown itself, has spread, and multiplied, and accumulated, without a corresponding inward expansion and unification; but in Paris they have pulled down and built larger, and the spirit of centralization has had full play.  Hence the French capital is superb, but soon grows monotonous.  See one street and boulevard, and you have seen it all.  It has the unity and consecutiveness of a thing deliberately planned and built to order, from beginning to end.  Its stone is all from one quarry, and its designs are all the work of one architect.  London has infinite variety, and quaintness, and picturesqueness, and is of all possible shades of dinginess and weather-stains.  It shows its age, shows the work of innumerable generations, and is more an aggregation, a conglomeration, than is Paris.  Paris shows the citizen, and is modern and democratic in its uniformity.  On the whole, I liked London best, because I am so much of a countryman, I suppose, and affect so little the metropolitan spirit.  In London there are a few grand things to be seen, and the pulse of the great city itself is like the throb of the ocean; but in Paris, owing either to my jaded senses or to some other cause, I saw nothing that was grand, but enough that was beautiful and pleasing.  The more pretentious and elaborate specimens of architecture, like the Palace of the Tuileries or the Palais Royal, are truly superb, but they as truly do not touch that deeper chord whose awakening we call the emotion of the sublime.

But the fitness and good taste everywhere displayed in the French capital may well offset any considerations of this kind, and cannot fail to be refreshing to a traveler of any other land,—­in the dress and manners of the people, in the shops and bazaars and show-windows, in the markets, the equipages, the furniture, the hotels.  It is entirely a new sensation to an American to look into a Parisian theatre, and see the acting and hear the music.  The chances are that, for the first time, he sees the interior of a theatre that does not have a hard, businesslike,