curtain.

BY GASTON V. DRAKE.

XVII.—FROM BOB TO JACK.

(Continued from last week.)

After you leave the Bois de Bologne you don't see much until you get to where the Palace of St. Cloud used to be, and even then you don't see much either, because there isn't much left to see. It's had hard luck St. Cloud has. It probably got more licking during the war with Prussia than any other town in France. Everybody took a whack at it. When the Germans weren't having fun with it the French would bombard it, until finally almost every house in it that hadn't already been shaken down, or bowled over with cannon-balls, was burned together with the Palace. It's a nice-looking old ruin though, and Jules says that on Sundays it fairly swarms with babies and lemonade stands. I'd sort of like to see it some Sunday, but Pop thinks Sunday is the best day to look at the churches.

There's another interesting place you pass on the way out to Versailles and that is Sevres where they make bric-a-brac. They make great big vases there that weigh so little you feel as if you ought to put a brick inside 'em to make 'em stay down. Jules was stationed here during the war, and he says it was fine. He could see all the big fires, and all the skirmishes that took place, and everybody had a sort of a notion that sooner or later there'd be a big crash in the bric-a-brac shop and Jules is just a human being like the rest of us. He hated to have the bric-a-brac smashed but if it had to be smashed he wanted to be on hand to see it go. That's me all over again. If I had my choice between seeing a King or a President of the United States, and a bull in a china shop, I think I'd choose the bull. When you think of how he'd toss tea-cups around and lash his tail around pile after pile of dinner plates and soup tureens—well, there's no use trying to describe a sight like that, but it's what Jules was waiting for at Sevres and it never happened. War is full of disappointments anyhow. Pop's uncle went to war once and he says it isn't a bit like the pictures. He says these parlor tableau generals with spick and span clothes on and horses rearing on their hind legs with their ears cocked aren't so, which I don't like to hear and I didn't believe it but Jules says it's true. He says making mud pies is clean alongside of war. I have had more ideas busted since I came over here than I ever thought one person could have. Dukes are plain, Kings are human, and war is not all bands and flags and glory but just grimy scrapping. I'm sure I don't know what to believe in any more.

After a while, after we'd driven through lots of pretty country we entered the town of Versailles, where the great palace is, and I tell you it was magnificent. Most of the Avenues have great trees arching over them, and when I say arching I mean arching because they are all trimmed and not allowed to grow foliaginous—that's one of Aunt Sarah's words—the way we let our trees grow at home. If a giant came walking by he'd think the trees formed a hedge, they grow so thickly together and are kept square cut on the top and arched underneath. They look as if an army of barbers had tended 'em all their lives. I don't think I'd like it always but once in a while it's interesting to see trees growing that way, and if I were a monkey there's nothing I'd like better than it because I could walk mile after mile from tree to tree without having to come down once.

As for the Palace of Versailles the best way to describe it is what Aunt Sarah said. "It baffles description" was what she said and that's what it does. It's so big in the first place that you can't take it in without looking eight or ten times, and when you try to go through it and see all there is to be seen you wish you had a year to spare to do it in. Such pictures, such sculptuary, such bric-a-brac you never saw before unless you'd been there before.

They had 36,000 men working on the Palace grounds at one time. When Pop heard that he nearly fainted. He gave me a sum in mental arithmetic to do. If our hired man can loaf three hours a day, how many hours a minute, can 36,000 hired men loaf. That's a dandy. Eh? Some time when I haven't anything else to do I'm going to work it out.

Once a lady wanted to go sleigh-riding in July out here, and she told the King, and he said all right go ahead, "Where'll I get the snow?" she said. "That's easy," said the King. "You get ready and it'll be all right." Pop says the King thought it would take her until winter to get her hat on straight, but it didn't. She was ready next morning, and he took her sleigh-riding over a road he'd had covered with salt. That's the way Kings did things, and that's why they discharged 'em.

We saw the royal carriages too, and they were royal. Gold all over even the wheels—just like the band-wagons at the circus. Some of 'em looked like show-cases, and Aunt Sarah says that's what they were and she's glad that day is gone when people liked that sort of thing and that's where she's wrong because that day hasn't gone. "People like it yet but they hate to pay for it," Pop says, and I guess that's it. That's what's the matter in France. They've got lots of beautiful things, but they've had to pay too much for 'em. This one palace cost a thousand million francs to build it which is two hundred million dollars, and after that they had to furnish it and keep it up, which made taxes so high that nobody had anything left, and when people haven't got anything left they're apt to get a little cross, which is what they did here, only they got cross with the wrong man, cut off the head of a King that didn't have anything to do with it, which strikes me as a poor way to get revenged on his great-grandfather.

It is long past bed-time and I must quit. I've made this letter pretty long because I've sort of hated to go to bed. Jules told me about the guillotine to-day, which is a sort of spile-driver with a knife in it to cut people's heads off, and I'm afraid I'm going to dream about it. Still I can't sit up forever and so good-night.

Bob.