Janitors and parlor-car conductors have replaced the wicked fairies of other days, but are apparently animated by their malignant spirit, and employ their hours of brief authority as cruelly. No witch dancing around her boiling cauldron was ever more joyful than the fireman of a modern hotel, as he gleefully turns more and more steam upon his helpless victims. Long acquaintance with that gentleman has convinced me that he cannot plead ignorance as an excuse for falling into these excesses. It is pure, unadulterated perversity, else why should he invariably choose the mildest mornings to show what his engines can do? Many explanations have been offered for this love of a high temperature by our compatriots. Perhaps the true one has not yet been found. Is it not possible that what appears to be folly and almost criminal negligence of the rules of health, may be, after all, only a commendable ambition to renew the exploits of those biblical heroes, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego? CHAPTER 12—The Paris of our Grandparents We are apt to fall into the error of assuming that only American cities have displaced their centres and changed their appearance during the last half-century. The “oldest inhabitant,” with his twice-told tales of transformations and changes, is to a certain extent responsible for this; by contrast, we imagine that the capitals of Europe have always been just as we see them. So strong is this impression that it requires a serious effort of the imagination to reconstruct the Paris that our grandparents knew and admired, few as the years are that separate their day from ours. It is, for instance, difficult to conceive of a Paris that ended at the rue Royale, with only waste land and market gardens beyond the Madeleine, where to-day so many avenues open their stately perspectives; yet such was the case! The few fine residences that existed beyond that point faced the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, with gardens running back to an unkempt open country called the Champs Elysées, where an unfinished Arc de Triomphe stood alone in a wilderness that no one ever dreamed of traversing. The fashionable ladies of that time drove in the afternoon along the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Château d’Eau, and stopped their ponderous yellow barouches at Tortoni’s, where ices were served to them in their carriages, while they chatted with immaculate dandies in skin-tight nankeen unmentionables, blue swallow-tailed coats, and furry ‘beaver” hats. While looking over some books in the company of an old lady who from time to time opens her store of treasures and recalls her remote youth at my request, and whose _spirituel_ and graphic language gives to her souvenirs the air of being stray chapters from some old-fashioned romance, I received a vivid impression of how the French capital must have looked fifty years ago.