“It’s the Fourteenth of July, Better-half, the anniversary of the taking of the Bastille. The French call this their Independence Day, so our garçon says. Something like our Fourth of July, I suppose.”
“Don’t they have Fourths of Julys?” put in Weezy. “What funny, funny folks!”
“Their Fourteenth seems to be Memorial Day and Fourth of July in one,” replied Paul. “Kirke and I are going to Père la Chaise this forenoon to see them decorate their soldiers’ graves.”
As the boys approached this cemetery, the finest in the city, they found the streets on every side filled with dealers in crosses and relics and immortelles; and these sombre tokens which were afterwards placed so tenderly above the sleeping dead were really hideous things.
“Not a single flower or green leaf in them, Molly,” said Kirke, on their return, “nothing but wire and tinsel and glass.”
But after their mourning duty was performed, the Parisians had a festive time for the rest of the day, dancing on the streets in the evening,—old men and old women, young men and young women, and babies and all.
The whole fortnight in Paris was a giddy whirl of delight to The Happy Six. They drove along the boulevards in fiacres, or on the tops of omnibuses. They sailed in pleasure boats on the Seine. They visited churches, palaces, and the tomb of Napoleon. They even ascended to the dizzy summit of the Eiffel Tower which Weezy said “reached ’most to heaven.”
Of all the days Donald preferred the last, at the Gardens of Acclimatization. Here he saw animals from every zone, and actually was carried on an ostrich’s back.
The children would all have liked a longer time in the beautiful white city, but Mr. Rowe was in haste to reach the baths of Baden Baden.
On the morning of their departure the Silver Gate people were joined at the railroad station by Miss Evans, who shook hands with them all very cordially.