rational man would grudge it if it could be presented in a
bill as a lump sum at breakfast time every morning and done with for the
day.

But the incessant necessity of handing out small tips of graded amounts
gets on one's nerves. It is necessary in Paris to go round with enough
money of different denominations in one's pocket to start a bank--gold
and paper notes for serious purchases, and with them a huge dead weight
of great silver pieces, five franc bits as large as a Quaker's
shoebuckle, and a jingling mass of coppers in a side pocket. These one
must distribute as extras to cabmen, waiters, news-vendors, beggars,
anybody and everybody in fact that one has anything to do with.

The whole mass of the coppers carried only amounts perhaps to
twenty-five cents in honest Canadian money. But the silly system of the
French currency makes the case appear worse than it is, and gives one
the impression of being a walking treasury.

Morning, noon, and night the visitor is perpetually putting his hand
into his side pocket and pulling out coppers. He drips coppers all day
in an unending stream. You enter a French theatre. You buy a programme,
fifty centimes, and ten more to the man who sells it. You hand your coat
and cane to an aged harpy, who presides over what is called the
vestiaire, pay her twenty-five centimes and give her ten. You are shown
to your seat by another old fairy in dingy black (she has a French name,
but I forget it) and give her twenty centimes. Just think of the silly
business of it. Your ticket, if it is a good seat in a good theatre, has
cost you about three dollars and a half. One would almost think the
theatre could afford to throw in eight cents worth of harpies for the
sake of international good will.

Similarly, in your hotel, you ring the bell and there appears the valet
de chambre, dressed in a red waistcoat and a coat effect of black
taffeta. You tell him that you want a bath. "Bien, monsieur!" He will
fetch the maitre d'hotel. Oh, he will, will he, how good of him, but
really one can't witness such kindness on his part without begging him
to accept a twenty-five centime remembrance. "Merci bien, monsieur."
The maitre d'hotel comes. He is a noble looking person who wears a dress
suit at eight o'clock in the morning with patent leather shoes of the
kind that I have always wanted but am still unable to afford. Yet I know
from experience that the man merely lives and breathes at fifty centimes
a