sketches of undressed deformities dangled from the walls, each by a single drawing-pin. Angelo, the hoary and picturesque attendant, followed us into this desolation, and said that such _monde_ as there was, with a contemptuous shrug, was _là-bas_. A glance into the lower studio, where half-a-dozen unknown Englishwomen were fighting over the position of a sulky model in the dress of a cardinal, was enough for us. We felt that ‘superfluous lags the veteran on the stage.’ We wandered on by familiar ways to the Luxembourg galleries--there, at least, we should find old friends; and we looked at Rosa Bonheur’s oxen with the eye of knowledge, and found them by no means up to the standard of Château Loudenne. When we got out into the gardens again, with their linked battalions of perambulators, and their thousand children courting sea-sickness on the zoological merry-go-rounds, the afternoon was still young. The tops of the tall horse-chestnuts were yellow in the sunshine, and above them, in the blue sky, the Eiffel Tower looked down on us, suggesting absurdly the elongated neck of Alice in Wonderland, when the pigeon accuses her of being a serpent. Its insistent challenge could no longer be resisted; in spite of the needle-cases, yard-measures, and paper-weights that had horridly familiarised us with its outlines, it was decidedly a thing to be done. People who would go to sleep if we talked to them about the vineyards, would wake to active contempt if they heard we had not been to the Eiffel Tower. We were deluded into getting off our tram too soon, and consequently had a long crawl through the empty Exhibition buildings and grounds before we reached our destination. To this, however, we owed the sight of the strange row of variety entertainments which we passed _en route_. A cup of coffee at forty-five centimes, or even a glass of beer at thirty centimes, would have entitled us to a chair or a marble table at any of these spectacles; but having taken a cursory view, from outside the crowd at the barriers, of the man in evening clothes mournfully bellowing something that sounded like a funeral ode to his mother, of the young lady with long yellow hair and short yellow petticoats giving a comic recitation flavoured with dancing, and of the infant phenomenon, whose performance on the piano was unfortunately reduced to dumb show by the success of the funny man next door, we were disposed to think that the coffee would be dear at the price.