If ever I indite a volume to be entitled Adventures in Paris it will contain not a line to feed any prurient fancy, but will embrace the record of many little journeys between the Coiffeur and the MarchÉ des Fleurs, with maybe an excursion among the cemeteries and the restaurants.

Each city is as one makes it for himself. Paris has contributed greatly to my appreciation, and perhaps my knowledge, of history and literature and art and life. I have seen it in all its aspects; under the empire, when the Due de Morny was king of the Bourse and Mexico was to make every Frenchman rich; after the commune and the siege, when the HÔtel de Ville was in ruins, the palace of the Tuileries still aflame, the column gone from the Place VendÔme, and everything a blight and waste; and I have marked it rise from its ashes, grandly, proudly, and like a queen come to her own again, resume its primacy as the only complete metropolis in all the universe.

There is no denying it. No city can approach Paris in structural unity and regality, in things brilliant and beautiful, in buoyancy, variety, charm and creature comfort. Drunkenness, of the kind familiar to London and New York, is invisible to Paris. The brandy and absinthe habit has been greatly exaggerated. In truth, everywhere in Europe the use of intoxicants is on the decline. They are, for the first time in France, stimulated partly by the alarming adulteration of French wines, rigorously applying and enforcing the pure-food laws.

As a consequence, there is a palpable and decided improvement of the vintage of the Garonne and the Champagne country. One may get a good glass of wine now without impoverishing himself. As men drink wine, and as the wine is pure, they fall away from stronger drink. I have always considered, with Jefferson, the brewery in America an excellent temperance society. That which works otherwise is the dive which too often the brewery fathers. They are drinking more beer in France--even making a fairly good beer. And then--

But gracious, this is getting upon things controversial, and if there is anything in this world that I do hybominate, it is controversy!

Few of the wondrous changes which the Age of Miracles has wrought in my day and generation exceeded those of ocean travel. The modern liner is but a moving palace. Between the ports of the Old World and the ports of the new the transit is so uneventful as to grow monotonous. There are no more adventures on the high seas. The ocean is a thoroughfare, the crossing a ferry. My experience forty years ago upon one of the ancient tubs which have been supplanted by these liners would make queer reading to the latter-day tourist, taking, let us say, any one of the steamers of any one of the leading transatlantic companies. The difference in the appointments of the William Penn of 1865 and the star boats of 1914 is indescribable. It seems a fairy tale to think of a palm garden where the ladies dress for dinner, a Hungarian band which plays for them whilst they dine, and a sky parlor where they go after dinner for their coffee and what not; a tea-room for the five-o'clockers; and except in excessive weather scarcely any motion at all. It is this palm garden which most appeals to a certain lady of my very intimate acquaintance who had made many crossings and never gone to her meals--sick from shore to shore--until the gods ordained for her a watery, winery, flowery paradise--where the billows ceased from troubling and a woman could appear at her best. Since then she has sailed many times, lodged À la Waldorf-Astoria to eat her victuals and sip her wine with perfect contentment. Coming ashore from our last crossing a friend found her in the Red Room of that hostel just as she had been sitting the evening before on shipboard.

"Seems hardly any motion at all," she said, looking about her and fancying herself still at sea, as well she might.