function. During the
period of this distinction, which falls in the month of May, the
boulevard becomes transformed into a veritable Coney Island of
merry-go-rounds, shooting-galleries, ginger-bread booths, and clap-trap
side-shows, to the endless delight of throngs of pleasure-seekers. There
is no sight in all Paris worthier inspection for the foreigner than the
Boulevard Pasteur offers at this season, for one gains a deep insight
into the psychology of a people through observation of the infantile
delight with which the adult population here throws itself into the
spirit of amusements which with other nations are for the most part
reserved for school-children. Only a race either in childhood or
senescence, it would seem, could thus give itself over with undisguised
delight to the enchantments of wooden horses, cattle, cats, and pigs; to
the catching of wooden fish with hooks; to the shooting at targets that
one could almost touch with the gun-muzzle, and to the grave observation
of sideshow performances that would excite the risibilities of the most
unsophisticated audience that could be found in the Mississippi Valley.

As we move among this light-hearted and lightheaded throng we shall
scarcely escape a feeling of good-humored contempt for what seems an
inferior race. It will be wholesome, therefore, for us to turn aside
from the boulevard into the Rue Dotot, which leads from it near its
centre, and walk a few hundred yards away from the pleasure-seekers,
where an evidence of a quite different and a no less characteristic
phase of the national psychology will be before us. For here, within
easy sound of the jangling discords of the organs that keep time for the
march of the _cheveaux de bois_, rises up a building that is in a sense
the monument of a man who was brother in blood and in sentiment to the
revellers we have just left in the boulevard, yet whose career stamped
him as one of the greatest men of genius of any race or any time. That
man was Louis Pasteur. The building before us is the famous institute
that bears his name.

In itself this building is a simple and unimposing structure, yet of
pleasing contour. It is as well placed as the surroundings permit, on a
grassed terrace, a little back from the street, where a high iron fence
guards it and gives it a degree of seclusion. There are other buildings
visible in the rear, which, as one learns on entering, are laboratories
and the like, where the rabbits an