I shall never forget this first morning’s impression of Paris, although all my impressions of it were delightful and inspiring, from the poorest quarter of the Charenton district to the perfections of the Bois and the region about the Arc de Triomphe. It chanced that this morning was bright, and I saw the Seine glimmering over the stones of its shallow banks and racing madly. How much the French have made of little in the way of a river! It is not very wide--about half as wide as the Thames at Blackfriars Bridge, and not so wide as the Harlem River. Here the Seine was as bright as a new button, its banks properly lined with gray, but not dull-looking, walls, the two streets which parallel it on each side alive with traffic; at every few blocks a handsome bridge; every block a row of very habitable, if not imposing, apartment-houses; at various points views of Notre-Dame, the Tuileries, the Cours-la-Reine, of the Trocadéro, and the Eiffel Tower. I followed the Seine from city wall to city wall one day, from Charenton to Issy, and found every inch of it delightful. I was never tired of looking at the wine-barges near Charenton; the little bathing-pavilions and passenger-boats in the vicinity of the Louvre; the brick-barges, hay-barges, coal-barges, and Heaven knows what else plying between the city’s heart and points down-stream past Issy. It gave me the impression of being one of the brightest, cleanest rivers in the world--a river on a holiday. I saw it once at Issy at what is known in Paris as the “green hour,” which is five o’clock, when the sun was going down, and a deep, palpable fragrance wafted from a vast manufactory of perfume filled the air. Men were poling boats of hay, and laborers in their great wide-bottomed corduroy trousers, blue shirts, and inimitable French caps, were trudging homeward, and I felt as though the world had nothing to offer Paris which it did not already have. I could have settled in a small house in Issy and worked as a laborer in a perfume factory, carrying my dinner-pail with me every morning, with a right good-will, or such was the mood of the moment. As I write this, the mood comes back. This morning, on our way to St.-Etienne-du-Mont and the cathedral, we examined the book-stalls along the Seine. To enjoy them, one has to be in an idle mood and love out of doors; for they consist of a dusty row of four-legged boxes, with lids coming quite to your chest in height, and reminding one of those high-legged counting-tables at which clerks sit on tall stools making entries in their ledgers. These boxes are old and paintless and weather-beaten; and at night the very dusty-looking keepers, who from early morning until dark have had their shabby-backed wares spread out where dust and sunlight and wind and rain can attack them, pack them in the body of the box on which they are lying and close the lid. You can always see an idler or two here, perhaps many idlers, between the Quai d’Orsay and the Quai Voltaire.