But they fled.
She is on my hands yet. I am willing to trade her for an elephant, and give boot. Or, I will agree to fight her with an elephant, the victor to yield up his champion to the vanquished.
She is not the box I ordered. Mr. Troll says she is; but as I was present and he was not, perhaps I ought to know better than he. He frankly offers to take her back if I will ship her to Geneva, and says he will give me the other kind of box. That is creditable, and is all he could be expected to do; but as my life and limbs are valuable to me I am not going to try to pack that thing in these times when accident policies are so high.
The moral of this little tale is, when you order a music box in Geneva, furnish your tunes at once, then no mistake will be made, and you will get what you order. But if you delay as I did, Mr. Troll’s young man’s memory may become uncertain and cause a disappointment to be inflicted upon you. No intentional wrong will be done you, for it is an honorable and trustworthy house, but no matter, if you delay too much you may have the bitterness of seeing that the charming instrument you have so long been waiting for is not that enchanting instrument at all, but a Gatling gun in disguise.
The Grand Prix is the great race of the year in France; so the knowing all tell me; and they also tell me that it is to the Parisian fashionable season what the benediction is to a church service—it ends it. After the Grand Prix is run, the fashionables who can afford to go away to the summer resorts do so, and the fashionables who cannot, pretend to do it.
Everybody goes to the great race. It is in the spacious Park, the Bois de Boulogne. All the cabs and carriages are secured beforehand for that day, and by two in the afternoon Paris is a silent wilderness of empty and unpeopled streets. Men, women and children who may not ride, walk; for the distance is only three or four miles, and after one has left the Arch of Triumph a short way behind, the rest of his road lies through the cool and shady lanes of the great forest.
We went as guests of a friend, resident in Paris. We started at one o’clock in the afternoon, and found that wonderful avenue, the Champs Elysee already crowded from end to end with a rushing tornado of vehicles, about eight abreast. It was a dry, sunny summer’s day, yet there was no dust. After we got out of the city and entered the forest, we found the main roads crowded in the same way. These roads were fringed on both sides with policemen. I think I never saw so many policemen in one day before. If a horse grew restive, three or four of them were at his head in a moment; if anything occurred to block the procession, they swarmed into the road and started the forward movement again; they were at hand, always, to prevent disturbances as well as to put a stop to them. Without this active vigilance the innumerable caravan would have been in constant confusion, and consequently would have been hours making its short journey; a section of it could not stop and the rest go on—no, the checking of one section dammed the whole prodigious stream of four solid miles of vehicles. Through the watchfulness of the police the stream was enabled to flow swiftly on, with hardly ever an interruption.
It was a marvelous journey. It was as if the world was emigrating.
We reached the race course. Vast detachments of vehicles broke away from the procession and drove into the ample enclosure, but we went on with the main body. We passed several gates and ticket offices, and stopped at the gate nearest to the grand stand. Then the brilliant sun was suddenly eclipsed and the rain poured down in flooding torrents. One would naturally say, What of that?—a summer shower is nothing. But in the present circumstances it was a good deal; for the French ladies dress as for a dinner or a state ball when they go to this great national race. Hardly any of the carriages had been closed, so suddenly had the shower come. I saw scores of open carriages whirl by, whose occupants sat with heads bowed to the drenching cataract, while their gorgeous plumage wilted down and clung to their bodies in tripy corrugations like the wrinkles in a washer-woman’s hand.
1 comment