Earlier that same evening we spent a gloom-laden quarter of an hour in another cafe—­one which owes its fame and most of its American customs to the happy circumstance that in a certain famous comic opera produced a few years ago a certain popular leading man sang a song extolling its fascinations.  The man who wrote the song must have had a full-flowered and glamorous imagination, for he could see beauty where beauty was not.  To us there seemed nothing particularly fanciful about the place except the prices they charged for refreshments.  However, something unusual did happen there once.  It was not premeditated though; the proprietor had nothing to do with it.  Had he known what was about to occur undoubtedly he would have advertised it in advance and sold tickets for it.

By reason of circumstances over which he had no control, but which had mainly to do with a locked-up wardrobe, an American of convivial mentality was in his room at his hotel one evening, fairly consumed with loneliness.  Above all things he desired to be abroad amid the life and gayety of the French capital; but unfortunately he had no clothes except boudoir clothes, and no way of getting any, either, Which made the situation worse.  He had already tried the telephone in a vain effort to communicate with a ready-made clothing establishment in the Rue St. Honore.  Naturally he had failed, as he knew he would before he tried.  Among Europeans the telephone is not the popular and handy adjunct of every-day life it is among us.  The English have small use for it because it is, to start with, a wretched Yankee invention; besides, an Englishman in a hurry takes a cab, as his father before him did—­takes the same cab his father took, if possible—­and the Latin races dislike telephone conversations because the gestures all go to absolute waste.  The French telephone resembles a dingus for curling the hair.  You wrap it round your head, with one end near your mouth and the other end near your ear, and you yell in it a while and curse in it a while; and then you slam it down and go and send a messenger.  The hero of the present tale, however, could not send a messenger—­the hotel people had their orders to the contrary from one who was not to be disobeyed.

Finally in stark desperation, maddened by the sounds of sidewalk revelry that filtered up to him intermittently, he incased his feet in bed-room slippers, slid a dressing gown over his pajamas, and negotiated a successful escape from the hotel by means of a rear way.  Once in the open he climbed into a handy cab and was driven to the cafe of his choice, it being the same cafe mentioned a couple of paragraphs ago.

Through a side entrance he made a hasty and unhindered entrance into this place—­not that he would have been barred under any circumstances, inasmuch as he had brought a roll with him.  A person with a cluster of currency on hand is always suitably dressed in Paris, no matter if he has nothing else on; and this man had brought much ready cash with him.  He could have gone in fig-leaved like Eve, or fig-leafless like September Morn, it being remembered that as between these two, as popularly depicted, Morn wears even less than Eve.  So he whisked in handily, and when he had hidden the lower part of himself under a table he felt quite at home and proceeded to have a large and full evening.