Divers lunatics, who had been away and were just getting back, and sundry lunatics who were fixing to go away and apparently did not expect ever to get back, were dashing headlong into the arms of still other lunatics, kissing and hugging them, and exchanging farewells and sacre-bleuing with them in the maddest fashion imaginable.  From time to time I laid violent hands on a flying, flitting maniac and detained him against his will, and asked him for some directions; but the persons to whom I spoke could not understand me, and when they answered I could not understand them; so we did not make much headway by that.  I could not get out of that asylum until I had surrendered the covers of our ticket books and claimed our baggage and put it through the customs office.  I knew that; the trouble was I could not find the place for attending to these details.  On a chance I tried a door, but it was distinctly the wrong place; and an elderly female on duty there got me out by employing the universal language known of all peoples.  She shook her skirts at me and said Shoo!  So I got out, still toting five or six bags and bundles of assorted sizes and shapes, and tried all the other doors in sight.

Finally, by a process of elimination and deduction, I arrived at the right one.  To make it harder for me they had put it around a corner in an elbow-shaped wing of the building and had taken the sign off the door.  This place was full of porters and loud cries.  To be on the safe side I tendered retaining fees to three of the porters; and thus by the time I had satisfied the customs officials that I had no imported spirits or playing cards or tobacco or soap, or other contraband goods, and had cleared our baggage and started for the cabstand, we amounted to quite a stately procession and attracted no little attention as we passed along.  But the tips I had to hand out before the taxi started would stagger the human imagination if I told you the sum total.

There are few finer things than to go into Paris for the first time on a warm, bright Saturday night.  At this moment I can think of but one finer thing—­and that is when, wearied of being short-changed and bilked and double-charged, and held up for tips or tribute at every step, you are leaving Paris on a Saturday night—­or, in fact, any night.

Those first impressions of the life on the boulevards are going to stay in my memory a long, long time—­the people, paired off at the tables of the sidewalk cafes, drinking drinks of all colors; a little shopgirl wearing her new, cheap, fetching hat in such a way as to center public attention on her head and divert it from her feet, which were shabby; two small errand boys in white aprons, standing right in the middle of the whirling, swirling traffic, in imminent peril of their lives, while one lighted his cigarette butt from the cigarette butt of his friend; a handful of roistering soldiers, singing as they swept six abreast along the wide, rutty