Each returns to his respective avocation.  Impatient to get at my writing materials, I look up at the iron bars across the fifth-story windows above, and motion that if they will procure a rope I will descend from thence and enter the window.  They one and all point out into the street; and, thinking they have sent for something or somebody, I sit down and wait with Job-like patience for something to turn up.  Nothing, however, turns up, and at the expiration of an hour I naturally begin to feel neglected and impatient, and again suggest the rope; when, at a motion from le proprietaire, le portier pilots me around a neighboring corner to a locksmith’s establishment, where, voluntarily acting the part of interpreter, he engages on my behalf, for half a franc, a man to come with a bunch of at least a hundred skeleton-keys of all possible shapes to attack the refractory key-hole.  After trying nearly all the keys, and disburdening himself of whole volumes of impulsive French ejaculations, this man likewise gives it up in despair; but, now everything else has been tried and failed, the countenance of la portier suddenly lights up, and he slips quietly around to an adjoining room, and enters mine inside of two minutes by simply lifting a small hook out of a staple with his knife-blade.  There appears to be a slight coolness, as it were, between le proprietaire and me after this incident, probably owing to the intellectual standard of each becoming somewhat lowered in the other’s estimation in consequence of it.  Le proprietaire, doubtless, thinks a man capable of leaving the key inside of the door must be the worst type of an ignoramus; and certainly my opinion of him for leaving such a diabolical arrangement unchanged in the latter half of the nineteenth century is not far removed from the same.

Visiting the headquarters of the Societe Velocipedique Mctropolitaine on Friday evening, I obtain from the president the desired directions regarding the route, and am all prepared to continue eastward in the morning.  Wheeling down the famous Champs Elysees at eleven at night, when the concert gardens are in full blast and everything in a blaze, of glory, with myriads of electric lights festooned and in long brilliant rows among the trees, is something to be remembered for a lifetime.  Before breakfast I leave the city by the Porte Daumesiul, and wheel through the environments toward Vincennes and Jonville, pedalling, to the sound of martial music, for miles beyond the Porte.  The roads for thirty miles east of Paris are not Normandy roads, but the country for most of the distance is fairly level, and for mile after mile, and league beyond league, the road is beneath avenues of plane and poplar, which, crossing the plain in every direction like emerald walls of nature’s own building, here embellish and beautify an otherwise rather monotonous stretch of country.  The villages are little different from the villages of Normandy, but the churches have not the architectural beauty