As the little speck drew straight overhead, these human specks scattered over the Place de la Concorde suddenly realized that they were in the line of fire, and scattered just as people run from a sudden shower. This was the most interesting thing--these helpless little humans scrambling away like ants or beetles to shelter, and that tiny insolent bird sailing slowly far overhead. This was a bit of the modern war one reads about--it was a picture from some fanciful story of Mr. H. G. Wells. They scattered for the arcades, and some, quaintly enough, ran under the trees in the near-by Champs-Elysées. There was a "Bang!" at which everybody shouted "There!" but it was not a bomb, only part of the absurd fusillade that now began. They were firing from the Eiffel Tower, whence they might possibly have hit something, and from roofs with ordinary guns and revolvers which could not possibly have hit anything at all. In the gray haze that hung over Paris the next morning, I wandered through empty streets and finally, with some vague notion of looking out, up the hill of Montmartre. All Paris lay below, mysterious in the mist, with that strange, poignant beauty of something trembling on the verge. One could follow the line of the Seine and see the dome of the Invalides, but nothing beyond. I went down a little way from the summit and, still on the hill, turned into the Rue des Abbesses, crowded with vegetable carts and thrifty housewives. The gray air was filled with their bargaining, with the smell of vegetables and fruit, and there, in front of two men playing violins, a girl in black, with a white handkerchief loosely knotted about her throat, was singing of the little Alsatian boy, shot by the Prussians because he cried "Vive la France!" and threatened them with his wooden gun.