he appearance of a New York restaurant.
The young man has made a successful bid for the fashionable patronage of
New Orleans, and there is dancing in the Louisiane in the evening.
Jules, upon the other hand, is perhaps more the director than his
brother Fernand--more the suave delightful host, less the man of cap and
apron. Jules loves to give parties--to astonish his guests with a
brilliant dinner and with his unrivaled grace as gerant. That he is able
to do these things no one is better aware than my companion and I, for
it was our good fortune to be accepted by Jules as friends and fellow
artists.

Never while my companion and I lived at Antoine's did we escape the
feeling that we were not in the United States, but in some foreign land.
To go to his rooms he went upstairs, around a corner, down a few steps,
past a pantry, and a back stairway by which savory smells ascended from
the kitchen, along a latticed gallery overlooking a courtyard like that
of some inn in Segovia, along another gallery running at right angles to
the first and overlooking the same court, including the kitchen door and
the laundry, and finally to a chamber with French doors, a canopied bed,
and French windows opening upon a balcony that overlooked the side
street. His room was called "The Creole Yacht," while mine was the
"Maison Vert."

I remember a room in that curious little hotel opposite the Cafe du
Dome, in Paris (the hotel in which it is said Whistler stayed when he
was a student), which almost exactly resembled my room at Antoine's,
even to the dust which was under the bed--until 'Genie got to work with
broom and brush. Moreover, connected with my room there was a bath which
actually had a _chaufbain_ to heat the water: one of those weird French
machines resembling the engine of a steam launch, which pops savagely
when you light the gas beneath it, and which, as you are always
expecting it to blow up and destroy you, converts the morning ablutions
from a perfunctory duty into a great adventure.

Then too, there was Marie who has attended to the _linge_ at Antoine's
for the last fifty years, and who helped the gray-haired genial Eugenie
to "make proper the rooms." Ever since 'Genie--as she is called, for
short--came from her native Midi, she has been at Antoine's; and like
Francois--the gentle, kindly, white-mustached old waiter who, when we
were there, had just moved up to Antoine's after thirty-five years'
service at the Louisiane--