It is very much of a step from the Académie Française to the Fête of Flowers in the Bois de Boulogne, but the latter comes under the head of one of the shows of Paris, and is to me one of the prettiest and the most remarkable. I do not believe that it could be successfully carried out in any other city in the world. There would certainly be horse-play and roughness to spoil it, and it is only the Frenchman's idea of gallantry and the good-nature of both the French man and woman which render it possible. It would be an easy matter to hold a fête of flowers at Los Angeles or at Nice, or in any small city or watering-place where all the participants would know one another and the masses would be content to act as spectators; but to venture on such a spectacle, and to throw it open to any one who pays a few francs, in as great a city as Paris, requires, first of all, the highest executive ability before the artistic and pictorial side of the affair is considered at all, and the most hearty co-operation of the state or local government with the citizens who have it in hand. On the day of the fête the Allée du Jardin d'Acclimatation in the Bois is reserved absolutely for the combatants in this annual battle of flowers, which begins at four o'clock in the afternoon and lasts uninterruptedly until dinner-time. Each of the cross-roads leading up to the Allée is barricaded, and carriages are allowed to enter or to depart only at either end. This leaves an open stretch of road several miles in extent, and wide enough for four rows of carriages to pass one another at the same moment. Thick woods line the Allée on either side, and the branches of the trees almost touch above it. Beneath them, and close to the roadway, sit thousands of men, women, and children in close rows, and back of them hundreds more move up and down the pathways. The carriages proceed in four unbroken lines, two going up and two going down; and as they pass, the occupants pelt each other and the spectators along the road-side with handfuls of flowers. For three miles this battle rages between the six rows of people, and the air is filled with the flying missiles and shrieks of laughter and the most graceful of compliments and good-natured _blague_. At every fifty yards stands a high arch, twined with festoons trailing from one arch to the next, and temporary flagpoles flying long banners of the tricolor, and holding shields which bear the monogram of the republic. The long festoons of flowers and the flags swinging and flying against the dark green of the trees form the Allée into one long tunnel of color and light; and at every thirty paces there is the gleaming cuirass of a trooper, with the sun shining on his helmet and breastplate, and on other steel breastplates, which extend, like the mirrors in "Richard III.," as far as the eye can reach, flashing and burning in the sun. Between these beacons of steel, and under the flags and flowers and