The pastimes of the “little people” are infinitely more interesting than those of their betters. Here is no idle waste of money on fashion and display. Every penny spent brings in compound interest in relaxation and enjoyment. For the “little people” are mighty careful of their sous. When the small shopkeeper, with his wife and limited family, go to dine at a restaurant, it is an excellent lesson in domestic economy to watch their proceedings. One good dinner will be ordered, and the waiter places this, with a second relay of plates, before the shopkeeper, who shares this dinner with his wife, and the children feed surreptitiously off the parents’ plates. Thus four persons will have dined, and well, at the restaurant price of one. As foreigners are not supposed to be up to these dodges, they will find their adaptation of them difficult and discouraging. Those who prefer to picnic in the public woods on a Sunday have a better time. They fill a lunch basket according to purse and palate, and set out on the _impériale_ of the tram from the Louvre, which takes them for three sous each to the wood of Vincennes, one of the most charming of Parisian fringes. The people of Paris are more spoiled than any other, for public pleasure-grounds abound, and no one can complain that the rich have the monopoly of the best. Where will you find such an exquisite park as the dear little Parc Monceau, with its ruins, and emerald slopes cut and watered to look like carpets of plush, its alleys and gorgeous flower-beds? In London such a cultivated bit of fairy-land would be the exclusive property of the wealthy residents round this park; not so in Paris, where verdure and flowers are cared for for the public, to whom they belong. The people of Paris have won their freedom for ever, and the privileges of the wealthy are reduced to those they can pay for. Were they to attempt the appropriation of others, the Parisian workmen are quite ready to start another revolution. Their argument is that, so long as they are willing to work, they have a right to live, and living implies not only bread and meat, but a fair share of pleasures. These pleasures for them must be inexpensive, and their pleasure-grounds must be maintained at the cost of the public, which in turn is maintained at the cost of their labour. And so they are free of the Bois de Boulogne, a gem of public woods; of Vincennes, less prepared and perfumed and rigorously trimmed, with its wilder bits of scenery along the Marne, its hillsides and quaint solitudes; of Fontainebleau, that airy heaven of the artist, on the edge of one of the cemeteries of the _ancien régime_, the grand old palace of kings which now belongs to the nation, the little town asleep on its forest marge, where of old the Court played at life in high dramatic fashion, and “minuetted” itself with grace into the grave.