gh
it all a genial open-air feeling very soothing to the royal senses. Not
so the artist of to-day. The picture in the Salon is of blood. There
are torn limbs gnawed by crouching beasts, as a dog holds and gnaws a
bone; there are faces being torn, still quivering, from the writhing
body,--in fact, perhaps after all there is something to be said for the
way the Grand Monarch arranged his gallery.

The battle pictures and the Hall of Mirrors, and the fountains and so
on, are, I say, the things best worth seeing at Versailles. Everybody
says so. I really wish now that I had seen them. But I am free to
confess that I am a poor sightseer at the best. As soon as I get
actually in reach of a thing it somehow dwindles in importance. I had a
friend once, now a distinguished judge in the United States, who
suffered much in this way. He travelled a thousand miles to reach the
World's Fair, but as soon as he had arrived at a comfortable hotel in
Chicago, he was unable to find the energy to go out to the Fair grounds.
He went once to visit Niagara Falls, but failed to see the actual water,
partly because it no longer seemed necessary, partly because his room
in the hotel looked the other way.

Personally I plead guilty to something of the same spirit. Just where
you alight from the steam tramway at Versailles, you will find close on
your right, a little open-air cafe, with tables under a trellis of green
vines. It is as cool a retreat of mingled sun and shadow as I know.
There is red wine at two francs and long imported cigars of as soft a
flavour as even Louis the Fourteenth could have desired. The idea of
leaving a grotto like that to go trapesing all over a hot stuffy palace
with a lot of fool tourists, seemed ridiculous. But I bought there a
little illustrated book called the _Chateau de Versailles_, which
interested me so extremely that I decided that, on some reasonable
opportunity, I would go and visit the place.

[Illustration: Personally I plead guilty to something of the same
spirit.]

_V.--Paris at Night_

"WHAT Ah'd like to do," says the Fat Lady from Georgia, settling back
comfortably in her seat after her five-dollar dinner at the Cafe
American, while her husband is figuring whether ten francs is enough to
give to the waiter, "is to go and see something real wicked. Ah tell him
(the word 'him' is used in Georgia to mean husband) that while we're
here Ah just want to see everything that's going."

"All r