anybody who seemed to know its name—­but this game is a kind of glorified battledore and shuttlecock played with a small, hard ball capable of being driven high and far by smartly administered strokes of a hide-headed, rimmed device shaped like a tambourine.  It would seem also to be requisite to its proper playing that each player shall have a red coat and a full spade beard, and a tremendous amount of speed and skill.  If the ball gets lost in anybody’s whiskers I think it counts ten for the opposing side; but I do not know the other rules.

A certain indefinable, unmistakably Gallic flavor or piquancy savors the life of the people; it disappears only when they cease to be their own natural selves.  A woman novelist, American by birth, but a resident of several years in Paris, told me a story illustrative of this.  The incident she narrated was so typical that it could never have happened except in Paris, I thought.  She said she was one of a party who went one night to dine at a little cafe much frequented by artists and art students.  The host was himself an artist of reputation.  As they dined there entered a tall, gloomy figure of a man with a long, ugly face full of flexible wrinkles; such a figure and such a face as instantly commanded their attention.  This man slid into a seat at a table near their table and had a frugal meal.  He had reached the stage of demitasse and cigarette when he laid down cup and cigarette and, fetching a bit of cardboard and a crayon out of his pocket, began putting down lines and shadings; between strokes he covertly studied the profile of the man who was giving the dinner party.  Not to be outdone the artist hauled out his drawing pad and pencil and made a quick sketch of the long-faced man.  Both finished their jobs practically at the same moment; and, rising together with low bows, they exchanged pictures—­each had done a rattling good caricature of the other—­and then, without a word having been spoken or a move made toward striking up an acquaintance, each man sat him down again and finished his dinner.

The lone diner departed first.  When the party at the other table had had their coffee they went round the corner to a little circus —­one of the common type of French circuses, which are housed in permanent wooden buildings instead of under tents.  Just as they entered, the premier clown, in spangles and peak cap, bounded into the ring.  Through the coating of powder on it they recognized his wrinkly, mobile face:  it was the sketch-making stranger whose handiwork they had admired not half an hour before.

Hearing the tale we went to the same circus and saw the same clown.  His ears were painted bright red—­the red ear is the inevitable badge of the French clown—­and he had as a foil for his funning a comic countryman known on the program as Auguste, which is the customary name of all comic countrymen in France; and, though I knew only at second hand of his sketch-making abilities, I am willing