I protest that the scenes of earlier joys are always, and in the nature of things, a delusion and a snare. That vast and luscious orchard, so long and so fondly remembered, turns out to be no more than a scrubby clump of woebegone bearers of tasteless, sapless pears and wooden apples. The main street that we thought so wide and grand and gay, is a narrow, dirty, straggling collection of dingy, fly-blown marine stores and reach-me-down contraptions. The toffee-shop--the Star of the East, that glorious palace of delight--is a ramshackle, tumbledown hovel, with a stock of sloppy, sticky, sickly brandy-balls, and soiled peppermints. The confectioner's--ah, woe is me! When I lived in Paris, as a boy, what a mad, merry, reckless place it was! How admirably Offenbach set it to music in the rippling airs of _La Grande Duchesse_, which _tout Paris_ then whistled and sang! I think the sun in those days shone all the time, and Paris, newly rebuilt by Baron Haussman, glittered in bran new white and gold under a canopy of silky blue. Offenbach translated it all--sunshine, staring new white stone, gilt railings and eagles, joyous crowds, laughing women, madly merry mirlitons, dazzling uniforms, splendid horses and carriages, imperial tinsel, bright silk skies, universal carelessness, recklessness, and intoxication. It is all in the music of _The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein_. Then the Sunday picnics in the woods of Vincennes and St. Cloud! the _al fresco_ dinner-parties at the suburban cafés! the jousting games upon the river, where we knocked each other into the Seine, to the joy of ourselves and all beholders! and the old dances--ah! who could forget the dances of the fête at St. Cloud? Men in shirt-sleeves, girls without hats, spinning like coupled tornadoes, heedless of time, heedless of all measure, heedless of conventions. If they desired to dance the waltz, and the band chose to play the polka, _eh bien_, "_Zut_," to the band. [Illustration: THE CHAMPS ÉLYSÉES.] And the band! If the dancers didn't care, it was _bien égal_ to the band? _Parbleu._ Every blower blew his hardest, and arranged his time to his heart's content; every scraper scraped for novelty of effect, letting harmony take care of itself; and the drummer in his shirt-sleeves, contemptuous of all besides, spanked the sounding drum with a rollicking energy that put all other effects in the shade. How he did drum, that drummer! and smile, and cock his hat!