ke one long to cut capers. The buildings are a
blazing mass of royal purple and golden yellow, and national flags,
bunting and decorations that laugh in the glint of the Midas sun. The
streets a crush of jesters and maskers, Jim Crows and clowns, ballet
girls and Mephistos, Indians and monkeys; of wild and sudden flashes of
music, of glittering pageants and comic ones, of befeathered and belled
horses. A madding dream of color and melody and fantasy gone wild in an
effervescent bubble of beauty that shifts and changes and passes
kaleidoscope-like before the bewildered eye.

A bevy of bright-eyed girls and boys of that uncertainty of age that
hovers between childhood and maturity, were moving down Canal Street
when there was a sudden jostle with another crowd meeting them. For a
minute there was a deafening clamor of laughter, cracking of whips,
which all maskers carry, jingle and clatter of carnival bells, and the
masked and unmasked extricated themselves and moved from each other's
paths. But in the confusion a tall Prince of Darkness had whispered to
one of the girls in the unmasked crowd: "You'd better come with us, Flo,
you're wasting time in that tame gang. Slip off, they'll never miss
you; we'll get you a rig, and show you what life is."

And so it happened that when a half hour passed, and the bright-eyed
bevy missed Flo and couldn't find her, wisely giving up the search at
last, that she, the quietest and most bashful of the lot, was being
initiated into the mysteries of "what life is."

Down Bourbon Street and on Toulouse and St. Peter Streets there are
quaint little old-world places, where one may be disguised effectually
for a tiny consideration. Thither guided by the shapely Mephisto, and
guarded by the team of jockeys and ballet girls, tripped Flo. Into one
of the lowest-ceiled, dingiest and most ancient-looking of these
disguise shops they stopped.

"A disguise for this demoiselle," announced Mephisto to the woman who
met them. She was small and wizened and old, with yellow, flabby jaws
and neck like the throat of an alligator, and straight, white hair that
stood from her head uncannily stiff.

"But the demoiselle wishes to appear a boy, _un petit garcon_?" she
inquired, gazing eagerly at Flo's long, slender frame. Her voice was old
and thin, like the high quavering of an imperfect tuning fork, and her
eyes were sharp as talons in their grasping glance.

"Mademoiselle does not wish such a costume," g