Paris is pre-eminently the city of pleasures. In the gay summer season one can see hundreds of tourists strolling along the beautiful boulevards. At nights the principal ways are brilliantly lighted, and in passing by one sees scores of people in the fascinating cafés enjoying the refreshing night air and the merry music as they sit and sip.
The Champs Elysees at night is one great highway of pleasure. On either side are theatres and drinking gardens, and from every direction one hears the gay music of the orchestras.
One day while walking through one of the many beautifully kept parks we met a party of five young American students. They had ridden on bicycles from London to Paris and had stopped for a rest of several days, after which they intended making their way into Germany. These fellows were all members of the same class at Harvard and were touring Europe on their bicycles.
At our hotel we only secured breakfast and dinner. Lunch usually consisted of cheap French wine and a loaf of bread on one of the penny seats in the park.
We kept up our bluff remarkably well at the hotel, and, honestly, the landlady never even suspected that we were stranded. If she had known it, most probably she would have demanded pay in advance, but we talked so cleverly of how we enjoyed the theatre, how delightful the drive was, and such things that she never had a suspicion of our financial predicament.
One morning I came near getting myself into trouble for drenching a vegetable peddler with water. It seemed to me that he had been standing in the streets below for an hour, crying out his vegetables. I wanted to go to sleep but couldn't with all that racket going on below, so I filled the bowl with soapy water and dashed it all over him. When the water drenched him he yelled like an Apache Indian, and before long a policeman came up to investigate the source of such an act. Of course we were innocent! having just awakened from a sound slumber.
One of the most pleasant surprises of my stay in Paris was while waiting at the mail window of Thomas Cook and Son for the long expected coin, when whom should I see but my old comrade Goodman, vainly endeavoring to gain some information from a chesty policeman. Goodman did not see me and I had some real pleasure in watching him attempting to converse in French, when the only French he could muster to his service was, "Oui, Monsieur," and "Parlez vous Français?" Stepping up to him I laid my hand on his shoulder and said, "Pardon me, sir, but are you an American?"
Never have I seen one's face so radiant with joy and happiness. We soon got together and began to arrange and plan for our future maintenance and support, Goodman being in about the same condition, financially as the rest of us.
One who has never been in a large foreign city, far from friends and home, cannot comprehend the absolute feebleness, helplessness and lonesomeness, which we four fellows experienced for days.
The last night of the miserable days which we spent in Paris came very near terminating disastrously for Goodman and myself. It was a night at one of the largest dance halls in the Latin Quarter, the most dangerous portion of all Paris. Goodman and I paid our admission fee, one franc each, and immediately began looking around, hoping that we might find some one who would be so charitable as to present us to some of the charming dancers.