e lace caps,
and gray-haired old men, many in straight-brimmed high hats of a mode of
twenty years past. Here they sit and listen to the music under the cool
shadow of the trees, whose rich foliage forms an arbor overhead--a roof
of green leaves, through which the sunbeams stream and in which the fat,
gray pigeons find a paradise.

[Illustration: THE CHILDREN'S SHOP--LUXEMBOURG GARDENS]

There is a booth near-by where waffles, cooked on a small oven in the
rear, are sold. In front are a dozen or more tables for ices and
drinkables. Every table and chair is taken within hearing distance of
the band. When these musicians of the army of France arrive, marching in
twos from their barracks to the stand, it is always the signal for that
genuine enthusiasm among the waiting crowd which one sees between the
French and their soldiers.

If you chance to sit among the groups at the little tables, and watch
the passing throng in front of you, you will see some queer "types,"
many of them seldom en evidence except on these Friday afternoons in the
Luxembourg. Buried, no doubt, in some garret hermitage or studio, they
emerge thus weekly to greet silently the passing world.

A tall poet stalks slowly by, reading intently, as he walks, a well-worn
volume of verses--his faded straw hat shading the tip of his long nose.
Following him, a boy of twenty, delicately featured, with that purity of
expression one sees in the faces of the good--the result of a life,
perhaps, given to his ideal in art. He wears his hair long and curling
over his ears, with a long stray wisp over one eye, the whole cropped
evenly at the back as it reaches his black velvet collar. He wears, too,
a dove-gray vest of fine corduroy, buttoned behind like those of the
clergy, and a velvet tam-o'-shanter-like cap, and carries between his
teeth a small pipe with a long goose-quill stem. You can readily see
that to this young man with high ideals there is only one corner of the
world worth living in, and that lies between the Place de l'Observatoire
and the Seine.

Three students pass, in wide broadcloth trousers, gathered in tight at
the ankles, and wearing wide-brimmed black hats. Hanging on the arm of
one of the trio is a short snub-nosed girl, whose Cleo-Merodic hair,
flattened in a bandeau over her ears, not only completely conceals them,
but all the rest of her face, except her two merry black eyes and her
saucy and neatly rouged lips. She is in black bicycle bl