own from that big Napoleon Arch. Some arch,
that, isn't it? Yes, sir--down from there to the Place de la Concorde
and back again, around the Arch and on to the Bois. And there's a sight
for a man, too! To sit out on the Bois sidewalk, M'sieu, your chair
almost under the bushes, and watch those cabs and autos in the late
afternoon, coming on dark. Count them? No more than you could count
fire-flies of an evening in the West Indies--like one string of light."

"Mon Dieu! Come to the inner room, if you please, sir, and tell me more.
What a good angel which has sent you here! Twenty-five years since I
have seen my Paris. And the Tuileries, my friend, is it yet the same?"

"Just the same, M'sieu, a million bare-legged children with short white
socks running wild, and another half a million nurses with white caps
running wild after them. And the Eiffel Tower! But that's since your
time, M'sieu Perrault?"

"Ah--h, but have I not heard? Continue, continue, if you please, sir.
You bring a strange joy to my heart. The Louvre, for example--you have
been there, yes?"

"Been there? Yes, and 'most googoo-eyed from looking at the pictures
there--miles of 'em, aren't there?"

"Oh-h! and Mona Lisa--yes!"

"That dark one with the queer kind of a smile? She must have had green
eyes, that one--green eyes with lights in them. And she kept them all
guessing, I'll bet a hat, when she was alive--" and Bowen ran on till
every blessed breakwater man silently stole away. Bowen and old Perrault
had a three o'clock session that first night; and within the year he had
married Claire.

II

Having completed his work on the wireless plant at the Navy Yard, Bowen
thought himself due for a lay-off. And he did want to be home for a
while, but orders came to have installed before the end of the year an
experimental plant on Light-ship 67, which guarded Tide Rip Shoal to the
eastward.

Bowen, with his two helpers and his apparatus, took passage with Baldwin
on the wheezy little _Whist_ to where, twenty miles east by south from
the end of the breakwater, lay the tossing light-ship.

Baldwin was well acquainted with old 67. Every once in a while the
commandant would order Baldwin to make this trip for the accommodation
of somebody or other in the yard. "But a wonder," he observed now, as he
had observed a score of times before on nearing her--"a wonder they
wouldn't put one of those new class o' steam lightships out here. If I
was you, Bowen, I