At the Palais Royal there is one of the most radiant designs in coloured lights. The whole front of the place is covered with a picture of light which reminds one of the advertisements of the great white way between 40th and 50th Street, New York. Crimson and emerald and gold tell the glory of the fifty years of the Republic, the numbers 1870 and 1920 being festooned with dazzling light, and the names of all the Presidents in one great row--Thiers, MacMahon ... to Deschanel and Millerand--given the prominence of a dynasty. On all the sidewalks down below are trees of naked flames, gas-pipes with branches coming up out of the pavement and instead of leaves little jets of twinkling flame at which the crowd lights its cigarettes. The entrances to the grand avenues are surmounted by fantastic arches of most gorgeous illuminated colouring. In front of all this stand men and women thoroughly epaté, hypnotised by it, with mouths open and eyes dilated. "Oh but it's wonderful!" "I cannot take my eyes off it, can you?" "Look, neighbour, just look at that, eh!" "Ah but look!" "What splendour!" "What an effect!" And there is audible all the while a continuous collective low murmur of approbation and satisfaction. You walk slowly along the Avenue de l'Opera. There are uninterrupted rows of footlights along the bases of first and second storeys throwing a lurid glamour on solemn and stately tricolours. So it is all the way to the Opera House, and happy crowds, fluttering and chattering, now breaking into an infection of expectancy when all push forward to see some imagined interest somewhere, and then lurching back in gay disillusion and laughter. The lofty buildings like monuments to the goddess of Trade look down on diminutive people with bright faces and round heads, and the stone itself of Paris seems indulgent. Away however in those strange fields covered with darkness at this midnight hour, unilluminated, lie the silent ones, crosses without end--the signs of life laid down. France will not forget them and we shall not forget. So let us leave this gaiety behind and take the midnight train for Calais, for Dover, for London, for the Cenotaph, the Abbey, for new life. It is a full train and pulls out soberly from the gay city, and bears onward, onward to the little channel and the waiting boat which ere the dawn shall face the wonderful white cliffs of Albion and home.