buvette with zinc bar, and cheap restaurant with marble-topped tables. Five years ago a good meal could be bought here for less than a franc. Behind the bar bottles and glass vats reached up to the ceiling; upon the dirty, green, oil-painted walls, cheap almanacs and trivial popular prints hung, together with excellent drawings and sketches, presented to Madame by her clients. One by one the invités slipped in. Madame and her two girl waitresses laughed and giggled at the kitchen door, while the patron, grey-moustached, hollow-eyed and cadaverous, uncorked the bottles of wine behind the bar.

Here again for several hours the Spaniards re-created Spain. Perez is a player of temperament. Half of his skill and art he appears to suck from his audience. Thus at first he plays but indifferently well; but any music will rouse a crowd of Spaniards. To the growing excitement Perez responds, playing the better for it, thus creating more enthusiasm, and these interchanges continue, until he reaches the limit of his ability. But he is so sensitive to his audience that one indifferent person can take the edge off all his power. This night there was no one unresponsive. The playing of Perez became more and more brilliant. With his nails be rasped deep chords from his responsive instrument; to and fro he beat the strings in the remorseless rhythm of Jota Arragonesa. In the dimly lit café the dark figures and the sallow faces of the Spaniards were crowded about him in an irregular circle. "Olé! Olé!" they cried, and clapped their hands in time with the music. The air within the café throbbed and pulsated with the music. "Mais, c'est très bien," exclaimed Madame at intervals from her corner. "C'est très amusant, hein?" Two of the younger men were murmuring to the waitresses and were making them titter.

"Come," exclaimed Perez at last, "enough of this piece playing. Let us have a song. Vamos! who will sing?"

But something, possibly my presence, deterred the Spaniards from singing. They were shy as a group of schoolboys. One at last began to chant in a high quavering falsetto, but before the first half of his copla was ended he broke down into a laugh of hysterical shyness.

"Why then," cried Perez, "I'll have to sing myself, and Heaven knows I've got no voice."

The Spaniard believes that any singing is better than no singing. One of his chief pursuits in life is that of happiness—"allègre" he calls it. This allègre is produced not by perfect results but by evidence of good intentions. He would rather have a bad player who plays from his heart than a good player who plays for his pocket. Any singing, then, so long as it is of the right nature, will suffice, no matter what its musical effect. Perez's singing had allègre, but no music. He lowed like a calf, rising up into strange throaty hoarseness like a barrow merchant who has been crying his goods all day, and descending into dim growls of deep notes. But even he at last tired; and after Madame had been yawning for some while, after the last bottle of wine had been drained of its last drops, we slipped out one by one into the moonlit streets of Paris and said our farewells on the Boulevard

CHAPTER III

THE FRONTIER

I wonder what Charlemagne would have done if one had whisked him down from Paris to the Spanish Frontier in something under twenty hours? Probably the hero would have been paralysed with terror during the journey and would have revenged himself upon the magician by means of a little stake party.

But what would have been magic and miracle to Charlemagne remains in one's mind as a jumble—the interior of a second-class carriage; antimacassars; an adolescent who ate lusciously a basket of peaches, thereby reminding us that French peaches ripen early in June; intrusive knees and superfluous legs; an obese man who pinched my knee in his sleep, probably from habit; touches of indigestion which made one fidget, and in the dawn a little excitement roused by observing the turpentine tapping operations at work on the pine-trees by the side of the railroad—cemented together by the thick atmosphere of a summer's night enclosed between shut windows.

It is a strange fact that the more perfect do we make travelling, the more tedious does it become—I wonder whether the same may not apply to almost all progress in civilization.

The most primitive aspect of travel is that of walking, and even upon the most tedious of walks the exercise itself seldom degenerates into definite boredom, one is never far away from one's fellow men, yet even if one is quite alone the mere fact of walking is an occupation which cannot be despised; of riding similar things may be said. Coaching may have had its inconveniences, yet a coach drive cannot have been lacking in definite interest. One was in very close contact with one's fellow passengers, coaching made as strange bedfellows as any adversity, and the journey was seldom so short that one could enjoy a sort of snuffy insulation from one's fellows—mutual discomforts, even mutual terrors of footpads made a definite bond of humanity.

It is true that in all these primitive processes the act of getting from here to there is prolonged—perhaps extremely prolonged—but mere duration is not tedium. If the act itself is interesting and vivid then the act itself is worth while. To-day the act of travelling by a fast train is scarcely worth while—the traveller can almost count it out as so much time lost out of life. I fear that when the aeroplane is perfected journeys will be performed in a tedium absolutely unrelieved, and those patients who have to undertake journeys would be advised to take a mild anæsthetic at the beginning.

What is missing to-day from the act of travelling—and what lacks from much modern civilization—is the expectation of the unexpected; the sense of adventure, the true sauce of life.

Now to have the true sense of adventure it is not necessary that one should always be expecting to meet a lion round the corner. Any little thing will do, anything not before experienced, anything that will give the imagination that extra fillip of interest which will convince it that the world will always remain a Fortunatus purse of new things to learn, anything that will make positive the fact that the act of living is also the act of growing,—anything of this nature will contribute to the sense of adventure.

But the trend of civilization to-day is that all these little interests are being quietly but very effectively crushed: we fling them beneath the wheels of railway trains and into the cogs of factories, with the result that only those experiences which are too large for us to fling thus are allowed to flourish. We have, in fact, almost cleared away the little things and left only the big. Now, if we turn the corner, either there is nothing at all or, in one case out of a hundred, we find the lion. In our railway travelling to-day, either nothing happens or there is a railway accident; but we have turned so many corners in our lives which led to the mere blankness of more empty road, that the possibility of the lion has almost faded from our minds—and so the sense of adventure in little, the true sense of adventure, is in danger of atrophy.

Some day, I feel sure that this sense of adventure will take a revenge on the civilization which would destroy it. We kill off birds and caterpillars flourish. Some worm lies near the heart of things ready to gnaw at the right moment. I fear that never will they apply "preservation laws" to the sense of adventure, or we, as adventurers, properly appreciated,