Each of the generations thinks itself commonplace. Familiarity breeds equally indifference and contempt. Yet no age of the world has witnessed so much of the drama of life--of the romantic and picturesque--as the age we live in. The years betwixt Agincourt and Waterloo were not more delightfully tragic than the years between Serajevo and Senlis.

The gay capital of France remains the center of the stage and retains the interest of the onlooking universe. All roads lead to Paris as all roads led to Rome. In Dickens' day "a tale of two cities" could only mean London and Paris then, and ever so unalike. To be brought to date the title would have now to read "three," or even "four," cities, New York and Chicago putting in their claims for mundane recognition.

I have been not only something of a traveller, but a diligent student of history and a voracious novel reader, and, once-in-a-while, I get my history and my fiction mixed. This has been especially the case when the hum-drum of the Boulevards has driven me from the fascinations of the Beau Quartier into the by-ways of the Marais and the fastnesses of what was once the Latin Quarter. More than fifty years of intimacy have enabled me to learn many things not commonly known, among them that Paris is the most orderly and moral city in the world, except when, on rare and brief occasions, it has been stirred to its depths.

I have crossed the ocean many times--have lived, not sojourned, on the banks of the Seine, and, as I shall never see the other side again--do not want to see it in its time of sorrow and garb of mourning--I may be forgiven a retrospective pause in this egotistic chronicle. Or, shall I not say, a word or two of affectionate retrogression, though perchance it leads me after the manner of Silas Wegg to drop into poetry and take a turn with a few ghosts into certain of their haunts, when you, dear sir, or madame, or miss, as the case may be, and I were living that "other life," whereof we remember so little that we cannot recall who we were, or what name we went by, howbeit now-and-then we get a glimpse in dreams, or a "hunch" from the world of spirits, or spirts-and-water, which makes us fancy we might have been Julius Caesar, or Cleopatra--as maybe we were!--or at least Joan of Arc, or Jean Valjean!