Of course the visitor in Paris misses a great deal that the true boulevardier enjoys through not knowing or understanding all that he sees. But, on the other hand, he has an advantage in being able to imagine that he is surrounded by all the famous journalists and poets and noted duellists; and every clerk with a portfolio becomes a Deputy, and every powdered and auburn-haired woman who passes in an open fiacre is a celebrated actress of the Comédie Française. He can distribute titles as freely as the Papal court, and transform long-haired students into members of the Institute, and promote the boys of the Polytechnic School, in their holiday cocked hats and play-swords, into lieutenants and captains of the regular army. He believes that the ill-looking individual in rags who shows such apparent fear of the policeman on the corner really has forbidden prints and books to sell, and that the guides who hover about like vultures looking for a fresh victim have it in their power to show him things to which they only hold the key--things which any Frenchman could tell him he could see at his own home if he has the taste for such sights. The best of the boulevards is that the people sitting on their sidewalks, and the heavy green trees, and the bare heads of so many of the women, make one feel how much out-of-doors he is, as no other street or city does, and what a folly it is to waste time within walls. I do not think we appreciate how much we owe to the women in Paris who go without bonnets. They give the city so homelike and friendly an air, as though every woman knew every other woman so well that she did not mind running across the street to gossip with her neighbor without the formality of a head-covering. And it really seems strange that the prettiest bonnets should come from the city where the women of the poorer classes have shown how very pretty a woman of any class can look without any bonnet at all. The enduring nature of the boulevards impresses one who sees them at different hours as much as does their life and gayety at every hour. You sometimes think surely to-morrow they will rest, and the cafés will be closed, and the long passing stream of cabs and omnibuses will stop, and the asphalt street will be permitted to rest from its burden. You may think this at night, but when you turn up again at nine the next morning you will find it all just as you left it at one the same morning. The same waiters, the same rush of carriages, the same ponderous omnibuses with fine straining white horses, the flowers in the booths, and the newspapers neatly piled round the colored kiosks. [Illustration: "THE PARTY PROMPTLY BROKE UP"]