"'Very much obliged, gentlemen, but I guess I'll have to get you to count me out this time.' I knowed I warn't fittin' to sit at anybody's table, especially if that old Admiral was comin'. "The Colonel see I was in earnest, and he stepped up, quick-like, and laid his hand on my shoulder. "'Captain Brandt,' he says, 'we ain't worryin' 'bout your clo'es, and don't you worry. You can come in your shirt, you can come in your socks, or you can come without one damned rag--only come!'" The Captain stopped, shook the ashes from his cigar, slowly raised himself to his feet, and reached for his hat. "Did you go, Captain?" I asked. The Captain looked at me for a moment with one of those quizzical glances which so often light up his face when something amuses him, and said, as he blew a cloud of smoke to the ceiling: "Well, I didn't forget my manners. When it got dark--dark, mind ye--I went up and sat on the piazza and had a smoke with 'em--Admiral and all. But I didn't go to dinner--not in them pants." A PROCESSION OF UMBRELLAS I This all happened on the banks of the Seine, above St. Cloud--above Suresne, in fact, or rather its bridge--the new one that has pieced out the old one with the quaint stone arches that we love. A silver-gray haze, a pure French gray, hung over the river, softening the sky-line of the near-by hills, and making ghosts of a row of gendarme poplars guarding the opposite bank. On my side of the stream wandered a path close to the water's edge--so close that I could fill my water-cups without leaving my sketching-stool. Over this path, striped with shadows, big trees towered, their gnarled branches interlaced above my head. On my right, rising out of a green sward cleared of all underbrush, towered other trees, their black trunks sharp-cut against the haze. In the distance, side by side with the path, wound the river, still asleep, save where it flashed into waves of silver laughter at the touch of some frolicsome puff of wind. Elsewhere, although the sun was now hours high, it dozed away, nestling under the overhanging branches making their morning toilet in its depths. But for these long, straight flashes of silver light glinting between the tree-trunks, one could not tell where the haze ended and the river began. As I worked on, my white umbrella tilted at the exact angle so that my palette, hand, and canvas would be hidden from the inquisitive sun, a group of figures emerged from a clump of low trees, and made their way across the green sward--the man in an ivory-black coat, evidently a priest, even at that distance; the woman in a burnt-umber dress with a dot of Chinese white for a head--probably a cap; and the third, a girl of six or eight in a brown madder dress and yellow-ochre hat.