hough the vibration of so many wheels all rolling home the same way
every afternoon had hypnotized them into silence, idiocy, and
melancholia.

And our three musketeers of the brush would speculate on the vanity of
wealth and rank and fashion; on the satiety that follows in the wake
of self-indulgence and overtakes it; on the weariness of the pleasures
that become a toil--as if they knew all about it, had found it all out
for themselves, and nobody else had ever found it out before!

Then they found out something else--namely, that the sting of healthy
appetite was becoming intolerable; so they would betake themselves to
an English eating-house in the Rue de la Madeleine (on the left-hand
side near the top), where they would renovate their strength and their
patriotism on British beef and beer, and household bread, and bracing,
biting, stinging yellow mustard, and horseradish, and noble
apple-pie, and Cheshire cheese; and get through as much of these in an
hour or so as they could for talking, talking, talking; such happy
talk! as full of sanguine hope and enthusiasm, of cocksure
commendation or condemnation of all painters, dead or alive, of modest
but firm belief in themselves and each other, as a Paris Easter egg is
full of sweets and pleasantness (for the young).

And then a stroll on the crowded, well-lighted boulevards, and a bock
at the cafe there, at a little three-legged marble table right out on
the genial asphalt pavement, still talking nineteen to the dozen.

Then home by dark old silent streets and some deserted bridge to their
beloved Latin Quarter, the Morgue gleaming cold and still and fatal in
the pale lamplight, and Notre Dame pricking up its watchful twin
towers, which have looked down for so many centuries on so many happy,
sanguine, expansive youths walking arm-in-arm by twos and threes, and
forever talking, talking, talking....

The Laird and Little Billee would see Taffy safe to the door of his
_hotel garni_ in the Rue de Seine, where they would find much to say
to each other before they said good-night--so much that Taffy and
Little Billee would see the Laird safe to _his_ door, in the Place St.
Anatole des Arts. And then a discussion would arise between Taffy and
the Laird on the immortality of the soul, let us say, or the exact
meaning of the word "gentleman," or the relative merits of Dickens and
Thackeray, or some such recondite and quite unhackneyed theme, and
Taffy and the Laird would