"There's something," said poppa, thoughtfully, as we ascended to the third floor, "in what Malt says." Next day we spent an hour buying trunks for the accommodation of the unattainable elsewhere. Then poppa reminded us that we had an important satisfaction yet to experience. "Business before pleasure," he said, "certainly. But we've been improving our minds pretty hard for the last few days, and I feel the need of a little relaxation. D.V. and W.P., I propose this afternoon to make the ascent of the Eiffel Tower. Are you on?" "I will accompany you, Alexander, if it is safe," said momma, "and, if it is unsafe, I couldn't possibly let you go without me." Momma is naturally a person of some timidity, but when the Senator proposes to incur any danger, she always suggests that he shall do it over her dead body. I forget where we were at the time, but I know that we had only to walk through the perpetual motion of Paris, across a bridge, and down a few steps on the other side, to find the little steamer that took us by the river to the Tower. We might have gone by omnibus or by fiacre, but if we had we should never have known what a street the Seine is, sliding through Paris, brown in the open sun, dark under the shadowing arches of the bridges, full of hastening comers and goers from landing-place to landing-place, up and down. It gave us quite a new familiarity with the river, which had been before only a part of the landscape, and one of the things that made Paris imposing. We saw that it was a highway of traffic, and that the little, brisk, business-like steamers were full of people, who went about in them because it was the cheapest and most convenient way, and not at all for the pleasure of a trip by water. We noticed, too, a difference in these river-going people. Some of them carried baskets, and some of them read the _Petit Journal_, and they all comfortably submitted to the good-natured bullying of the mariner in charge. There were elderly women in black, with a button or two off their tight bodices, and children with patched shoes carrying an assortment of vegetables, and middle-aged men in slouch hats, smoking tobacco that would have been forbidden by public statute anywhere else. They all treated us with a respect and consideration which we had not observed in the Avenue de l'Opera, and I noticed the Senator visibly expanding in it. There was also a man and a little boy, and a dog, all lunching out of the same basket. Afterward, on being requested to do so, the dog performed tricks--French ones--to the enjoyment and satisfaction of all three. There was a great deal of politeness and good feeling, and if they were not Capi and Remi and Vitalis in "_Sans Famille_," it was merely because their circumstances were different.