Still, I judged them to have been genuine exhibits because here, for the first, last and only time in Paris, I found a shop where a stranger ready to spend a little money was not welcomed with vociferous enthusiasm.  The paired-off cave-dwellers merely scowled on us as we scrouged past them to a vacant bench in a far corner.  The waiter, though, bowed before us—­a shockheaded personage in the ruins of a dress suit—­at the same time saying words which I took to be complimentary until one of my friends explained that he had called us something that might be freely translated as a certain kind of female lobster.  Circumscribed by our own inflexible and unyielding language we in America must content ourselves with calling a man a plain lobster; but the limber-tongued Gaul goes further than that—­he calls you a female lobster, which seems somehow or other to make it more binding.

However, I do not really think the waiter meant to be deliberately offensive; for presently, having first served us with beer which for obvious reasons we did not drink, he stationed himself alongside the infirm piano and rendered a little ballad to the effect that all men were spiders and all women were snakes, and all the World was a green poison; so, right off, I knew what his trouble was, for I had seen many persons just as morbidly affected as himself down in the malaria belt of the United States, where everybody has liver for breakfast every morning.  The waiter was bilious—­that was what ailed him.

For the sake of the conventions I tried to feel apprehensive of grave peril.  It was no use.  I felt safe—­not exactly comfortable, but perfectly safe.  I could not even muster up a spasm of the spine when a member of our party leaned over and whispered in my ear that any one of these gentry roundabout us would cheerfully cut a man’s throat for twenty-five cents.  I was surprised, though, at the moderation of the cost; this was the only cheap thing I had struck in Paris.  It was cheaper even than the same job is supposed to be in the district round Chatham Square, on the East Side of New York, where the credulous stranger so frequently is told that he can have a plain murder done for five dollars—­or a fancy murder, with trimmings, for ten; rate card covering other jobs on application.  In America, however, it has been my misfortune that I did not have the right amount handy; and here in Paris I was handicapped by my inability to make change correctly.  By now I would not have trusted anyone in Paris to make change for me—­not even an Apache.  I was sorry for this, for at a quarter a head I should have been very glad to engage a troupe of Apaches to kill me about two dollars’ worth of cabdrivers and waiters.  For one of the waiters at our hotel I would have been willing to pay as much as fifty cents, provided they killed him very slowly.  Because of the reasons named, however, I had to come away without making any deal, and I have always regretted it.