d so enchanting, the chance to
play it such a piece of unmerited, unbelievable good fortune.

It must have been, I think, about the middle of October, for I
remember that the sycamores were almost bare in the Luxembourg
Gardens that morning, and the terrace about the queens of France
were strewn with crackling brown leaves. The fat red roses, out the
summer long on the stand of the old flower woman at the corner, had
given place to dahlias and purple asters. First glimpses of autumn
toilettes flashed from the carriages; wonderful little bonnets
nodded at one along the Champs-Elysees; and in the Quarter an
occasional feather boa, red or black or white, brushed one's coat
sleeve in the gay twilight of the early evening. The crisp, sunny
autumn air was all day full of the stir of people and carriages and
of the cheer of salutations; greetings of the students, returned
brown and bearded from their holiday, gossip of people come back
from Trouville, from St. Valery, from Dieppe, from all over Brittany
and the Norman coast. Everywhere was the joyousness of return, the
taking up again of life and work and play.

I had felt ever since early morning that this was the saddest of all
possible seasons for saying good-by to that old, old city of youth,
and to that little corner of it on the south shore which since the
Dark Ages themselves--yes, and before--has been so peculiarly the
land of the young.

I can recall our very postures as we lounged about Hartwell's rooms
that evening, with Bentley making occasional hurried trips to his
desolated workrooms across the hall--as if haunted by a feeling of
having forgotten something--or stopping to poke nervously at his
_perroquets_, which he had bequeathed to Hartwell, gilt cage and
all. Our host himself sat on the couch, his big, bronze-like
shoulders backed up against the window, his shaggy head, beaked
nose, and long chin cut clean against the gray light.

Our drowsing interest, in so far as it could be said to be fixed
upon anything, was centered upon Hartwell's new figure, which stood
on the block ready to be cast in bronze, intended as a monument for
some American battlefield. He called it "The Color Sergeant." It was
the figure of a young soldier running, clutching the folds of a
flag, the staff of which had been shot away. We had known it in all
the stages of its growth, and the splendid action and feeling of the
thing had come to have a kind of special significance for the h