he masterpieces of Europe.

Mueller bowed, and bowed, and bowed, like a Chinaman at a visit of
ceremony; He was more than proud; he was overwhelmed, _accable_, et
caetera, et caetera.

The Tapottes left off whispering, and listened breathlessly.

"He is evidently a great painter, _not' jeune homme_!" said Madame in
one of her large whispers.

To which Monsieur replied as audibly:--"_Ca se voit, ma femme--sacre nom
d'une pipe_!"

"Milford will do me the favor to sit again on Friday?" said Mueller, as I
took up my hat and gloves.

I replied with infinite condescension that I would endeavor to do so. I
then made the stiffest of stiff bows to the excellent Tapottes, and,
ushered to the door by Mueller, took my departure majestically in the
character of Lord Smithfield.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE QUARTIER LATIN.

The dear old Quartier Latin of my time--the Quartier Latin of Balzac, of
Beranger, of Henry Murger---the Quartier Latin where Franz Mueller had
his studio; where Messieurs Gustave; Jules, and Adrien gave their
unparalleled _soirees dansantes_; where I first met my ex-flame
Josephine--exists no longer. It has been improved off the face of the
earth, and with it such a gay bizarre, improvident world of youth and
folly as shall never again be met together on the banks of the Seine.

Ah me! how well I remember that dingy, delightful Arcadia--the Rue de la
Vieille Boucherie, narrow, noisy, crowded, with projecting upper stories
and Gothic pent-house roofs--the Rue de la Parcheminerie, unchanged
since the Middle Ages--the Rue St. Jacques, steep, interminable,
dilapidated; with its dingy cabarets, its brasseries, its cheap
restaurants, its grimy shop windows filled with colored prints, with
cooked meats, with tobacco, old books, and old clothes; its ancient
colleges and hospitals, time-worn and weather-beaten, frowning down upon
the busy thoroughfare and breaking the squalid line of shops; its grim
old hotels swarming with lodgers, floor above floor, from the cobblers
in the cellars to the grisettes in the attics! Then again, the gloomy
old Place St. Michel, its abundant fountain ever flowing, ever
surrounded by water-carts and water-carriers, by women with pails, and
bare-footed street urchins, and thirsty drovers drinking out of iron
cups chained to the wall. And then, too, the Rue de la Harpe....

I close my eyes, and the strange, precipitous, picturesque, decrepit old
street, with its busy, surging crowd, i