ight," says the Man from Kansas who "knows" Paris, "I'll get a
guide right here, and he'll take us round and show us the sights."

"Can you get him heah?" asks the gentleman from Georgia, looking round
at the glittering mirrors and gold cornices of the restaurant.

Can you get a guide? Well, now! Can you keep away from them? All day
from the dewy hour of breakfast till late at night they meet you in the
street and sidle up with the enquiry, "Guide, sir?"

Where the Parisian guide comes from and how he graduates for his job I
do not know. He is not French and, as a rule, he doesn't know Paris. He
knows his way to the Louvre and to two or three American bars and to the
Moulin Rouge in Montmartre. But he doesn't need to know his way. For
that he falls back on the taxi-driver. "Now, sir," says the guide
briskly to the gentleman who has engaged his services, "where would you
like to go?" "I should like to see Napoleon's tomb." "All right," says
the guide, "get into the taxi." Then he turns to the driver. "Drive to
Napoleon's tomb," he says. After they have looked at it the guide says,
"What would you like to see next, sir?" "I am very anxious to see Victor
Hugo's house, which I understand is now made open to the public." The
guide turns to the taxi man. "Drive to Victor Hugo's house," he says.

After looking through the house the visitor says in a furtive way, "I
was just wondering if I could get a drink anywhere in this part of the
town?" "Certainly," says the guide. "Drive to an American bar."

Isn't that simple? Can you imagine any more agreeable way of earning
five dollars in three hours than that? Of course, what the guide says to
the taxi man is said in the French language, or in something resembling
it, and the gentleman in the cab doesn't understand it. Otherwise, after
six or seven days of driving round in this way he begins to wonder what
the guide is for. But of course, the guide's life, when you come to
think of it, is one full of difficulty and danger. Just suppose that,
while he was away off somewhere in Victor Hugo's house or at Napoleon's
grave, the taxi-driver were to be struck by lightning. How on earth
would he get home? He might, perhaps, be up in the Eiffel Tower and the
taxi man get a stroke of paralysis, and then he'd starve to death trying
to find his way back. After all, the guide has to have the kind of pluck
and hardihood that ought to be well rewarded. Why, in other countries,
like Switzerland,