Tibbitts had a bottle of cognac in his room to mix with the water. He insisted that he thought too much of his mother and her happiness to endanger his life by taking the water, bad as it was, clear, and the wine of the country did not agree with him. He wanted to get back to America, he did, that his friends might have the benefit of his foreign experience. An American in London remarked, that in all the time he spent in that city he met but one cordial Englishman, and he was a Dublin man. So with me in Paris. In all the time I spent there I saw very few drunken Frenchmen, and they were to a man from either London or New York, and I made very thorough search. The sobriety of the people is something wonderful. [Illustration: THE CORRECTIVE USED BY MR. TIBBITTS.] I saw plenty of men exhilarated; I heard more laughter than I ever heard in twice the time in any other country; but drunkenness, the drunkenness that maunders, and is idiotic, or the drunkenness that tends to destroying property or life, I saw none of. In the Jardin Mabille, where in England or America drunkenness would be co-extensive with the attendance, at the students' balls, at the Chateau Rouge or at even the less pretentious places, there was hilarity in plenty, but no vinous or spirituous excess. The same condition of affairs obtains in Switzerland and Germany. I don't want any man to say this is not so, for I assert that drunkenness is comparatively unknown in the two countries where wine and beer are the staple drinks of the people of all classes. I am aware that the same statement has been made hundreds of times before and disputed a thousand times, and therefore I was at pains to get at the truth of the matter. The use of wine in France is universal. It is drank by the commonest laborer and the most aristocratic citizen. You go nowhere that you do not see it--it is everywhere present, and is the one drink of the country. The fruitful vineyards of France make it almost as cheap as water, and the pampered wives and daughters of the ancient nobility who bathed in wine were not guilty of a very frightful extravagance after all. [Sidenote: THE MILD SWASH.] What a Frenchman satisfies his appetite with for drink is [Illustration: THE COCO SELLER.] something astonishing. The middle-aged man in America who would deliberately ask for the root-beer of his youth would be laughed at as a milk-sop. In America even the lemonade drinker is not looked upon with favor, although that is admissible.