We arrived at last before a door in a short street near the Gare du Nord. Was it the Rue Jessaint? I do not know, for when, a year later, I attempted to re-find this _bal_ it had disappeared.... We could hear the hum of the pipes for some paces before we turned the corner into the street, and never have pipes sounded in my ears with such a shrill significance of being somewhere they ought not to be, never but once, and that was when I had heard the piper who accompanies the dinner of the Governor of the Bahamas in Nassau. Marching round the porch of the Governor's Villa he played _The Blue Bells of Scotland_ and _God Save the King_, but, hearing the sound from a distance through the interstices of the cocoa-palm fronds in the hot tropical night, I could only think of a Hindoo blowing the pipes in India, the charming of snakes.... So, as we turned the corner into the Rue Jessaint, I seemed to catch a faint glimpse of a scene on the lawn at Versailles.... Louis XIV--it was the epoch of Cinderella! But it wasn't a bag-pipe at all. That we discovered when we entered the room, after passing through the bar in the front. The _bal_ was conducted in a large hall at the back of the _maison_. In the doorway lounged an _agent de service_, always a guest at one of these functions, I found out later. There were rows of tables, long tables, with long wooden benches placed between them. One corner of the floor was cleared--not so large a corner either--for dancing, and on a small platform sat the strangest looking youth, like Peter Pan never to grow old, like the _Monna Lisa_ a boy of a thousand years, without emotion or expression of any sort. He was playing an accordion; the bag-pipe, symbol of the _bal_, hung disused on the wall over his head. His accordion, manipulated with great skill, was augmented by sleigh-bells attached to his ankles in such a manner that a minimum of movement produced a maximum of effect; he further added to the complexity of sound and rhythm by striking a cymbal occasionally with one of his feet. The music was both rhythmic and ordered, now a waltz, now a tune in two-four time, but never faster or slower, and never ending ... except in the middle of each dance, for a brief few seconds, while the _patronne_ collected a _sou_ from each dancer, after which the dance proceeded. All the time we remained never did the musician smile, except twice, once briefly when I sent word to him by the waiter to order a _consommation_ and once, at some length, when we departed. On these occasions the effect was almost emotionally illuminating, so inexpressive was the ordinary cast of his features. A strange lad; I like to think of him always sitting there, passively, playing the accordion and shaking his sleigh-bells. He suggested a static picture, a thing of always, but I know it is not so, for even the next summer he had disappeared along with the _bal_ and now he may have been shot