n why. The cabdrivers in line along the sidewalk seemed
to enjoy their neighborhood. I heard one of them, with a face like
a halfripened strawberry, red, with a white nose, say to a comrade,
"Hallo, Francis! that smells good, doesn't it!"

I was walking along slowly, looking into every stall, and when I came to
the end I turned right about face.

Great Heavens! Not ten feet off! M. Flamaran, M. Charnot, and
Mademoiselle Jeanne!

They had stopped before one of the stalls that I had just left. M.
Flamaran was carrying under his arm a pot of cineraria, which made his
stomach a perfect bower. M. Charnot was stooping, examining a superb
pink carnation. Jeanne was hovering undecided between twenty bunches of
flowers, bending her pretty head in its spring hat over each in turn.

"Which, father?"

"Whichever you like; but make up your mind soon; Flamaran is waiting."

A moment more, and the elective affinities carried the day.

"This bunch of mignonette," she said.

I would have wagered on it. She was sure to choose the mignonette--a
fair, well-bred, graceful plant like herself. Others choose their
camellias and their hyacinths; Jeanne must have something more refined.

She put down her money, caught up the bunch, looked at it for a moment,
and held it close to her breast as a mother might hold her child, while
all its golden locks drooped over her arm. Then off she ran after her
father, who had only changed one carnation for another. They went on
toward St. Sulpice--M. Flamaran on the right, M. Charnot in the middle,
Jeanne on the left. She brushed past without seeing me. I followed
them at a distance. All three were laughing. At what? I can guess; she
because she was eighteen, they for joy to be with her. At the end of
the marketplace they turned to the left, followed the railings of the
church, and bent their steps toward the Rue St. Sulpice, doubtless to
take home M. Flamaran, whose cineraria blazed amid the crowd. I
was about to turn in the same direction when an omnibus of the
Batignolles-Clichy line stopped my way. In an instant I was overwhelmed
by the flood of passengers which it poured on the pavements.

"Hallo, you here! How goes it? What are you staring at? My stovepipe?
Observe it well, my dear fellow--the latest invention of Leon; the
patent ventilating, anti-sudorific, and evaporating hat!"

It was Larive who had just climbed down from the knifeboard.

Every one knows Larive, head clerk in Machin's o