There are a great number of Americans who are only in Paris for the month, and whom you have seen on the steamer, or passing up the Rue de la Paix, or at the banker's on mail day, and they seize this chance to recognize their countrymen, and grow tremendously excited in hitting each other in the eyes and on the nose, and then pass each other the next day in the Champs Élysées without the movement of an eyelash. The hour excuses all. It has the freedom of carnival-time without its license, and it is pretty to see certain women posing as great ladies, in hired fiacres, and being treated with as much _empressement_ and courtesy by every man as though he believed the fiacre was not hired, and the pearl necklace was real and not from the Palais Royal, and that he had not seen the woman the night before circling around the endless treadmill of the Jardin de Paris. Sometimes there will be a coach all red and green and brass, and sometimes a little wicker basket on low wheels, with a donkey in the shafts, and filled with children in the care of a groom, who holds them by their skirts to keep them from hurling themselves out after the flowers, and who looks immensely pleased whenever any one pelts them back and points them out as pretty children. But the greater number of the children stand along the road-side with their sisters and mothers. They are of the good bourgeois class and of the decently poor, who beg prettily for a flower instead of giving one, and who dash out under the wheels for those that fall by the wayside, and return with them to the safety of their mother's knee in a state of excited triumph. When you see how much one of the broken flowers means to them, you wonder what they think of the cars that pass toppling over with flowers, with the harness and the spokes of the wheels picked out in carnations, and banked with shields of nodding roses at the sides and backs. These are the carriages entered for prizes, and some of them are very wonderful and very beautiful. One holds a group of Rastaqouères, who have spent a clerk's yearly income in decorating their victoria, that they may send word back to South America that they have won a prize from a board of Parisian judges.