How quiet it was in the great city! How strangely and deadly quiet! The heels of my two companions, and my own, made a click-clack down the pavements, as though we were walking through silent halls. Could this be Paris--this city of shuttered shops and barred windows and deserted avenues? There were no treasures displayed in the Rue de la Paix. Not a diamond glinted behind the window panes. Indeed, there were no windows visible, but only iron sheeting, drawn down like the lids of dead men's eyes. In the Avenue de l'Opéra no Teutonic tout approached us with the old familiar words, "Want a guide, sir?" "Lovely ladies, sir!" The lovely ladies had gone. The guides had gone. Life had gone out of Paris. It was early in the morning, and we were faint for lack of sleep and food. "My kingdom for a carriage," said the Philosopher, in a voice that seemed to come from the virgin forests of the Madeira in which he had once lost hold of all familiar things in life, as now in Paris. A very old cab crawled into view, with a knock-kneed horse which staggered aimlessly about the empty streets, and with an old cocher who looked about him as though doubtful as to his whereabouts in this deserted city. He started violently when we hailed him, and stared at us as nightmare creatures in a bad dream after an absinthe orgy. I had to repeat an address three times before he understood. "Hôtel St. James... Écoutez donc, mon vieux!" He clacked his whip with an awakening to life. "Allez!" he shouted to his bag of bones. Our arrival at the Hotel St. James was a sensation, not without alarm. I believe the concierge and his wife believed the Germans had come when they heard the outrageous noise of our horse's hoofs thundering into the awful silence of their courtyard. The manager, and the assistant manager, and the head waiter, and the head waiter's wife, and the chambermaid, and the cook, greeted us with the surprise of people who behold an apparition. "The hotel has shut up. Everybody has fled! We are quite alone here!" I was glad to have added a little item of history to that old mansion where the Duc de Noailles lived, where Lafayette was married, and where Marie Antoinette saw old ghost faces--the dead faces of laughing girls--when she passed on her way to the scaffold. It was a queer incident in its story when three English journalists opened it after the great flight from Paris.