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this way to the flea market MY friend said: “I think you ought to visit the Flea Market.” I looked at her with amazement and some distaste for I was still smarting under the memory of my encounter with one of the pests during my first few days in Paris. Presently she explained. Just outside of one of the gates of Paris—for Paris being a fortified city has several gates—there is held every Sunday from nine until four, a vast bazaar called the “Marché aux Puces,” the “Flea Market,” where one may buy all sorts of articles at considerable advantage.Originally the name was given because only very old and usually stolen wares were put on sale. But now both old and new objects are to be had and the market is a fully recognized and legitimate business. Accordingly the next Sunday I started for the Porte de Clígnancourt and the Marché aux Puces. My friend’s father was to accompany me, not only to show me the way but also to do the bargaining. “You look too easy,” said my candid friend, “you need some one to look them in the eye and beat them at their own game for the moment they spy a foreigner they immediately raise the price.” The father, a sturdy, grizzled, kindly Alsatian, was not at all like the Alsatian shepherd boy of the song. Indeed had I seen him in America I should have taken him without further thought for a German. Thus constantly are shaken my preconceptions with regard to the appearance of the French; they run so persistently contrary to type, that is to the type which we are told in America they most resemble. My guide knew his own neighborhood thoroughly and took me to a small Savings Bank, open for deposit on Sunday; to a church and, most interesting of all,to a small carpenter-shop designed for youngsters where boys of all sorts and conditions were happily engaged in drawing and planing and hammering. “Some of them,” said their instructor, “do it for fun and others because they have a genuine feeling for the trade.” This shop was part of a large school for poor children. Compulsory education has just been established in France and has been taken up with great thoroughness; in this one ward are fifty-two such institutions! Not only is the instruction free—an innovation for the French—but a luncheon is served gratis to the pupils every day. 252 At last we boarded the tramway and rode the length of Boulevard Ornano to the Porte de Clígnancourt and the Flea Market. I was not impressed at first for I saw to one side only a few booths, very much as we see sometimes on the East Side in New York, and on these booths were exhibited very ordinary articles of commerce—neckties, soap, powder, stockings. But presently the boulevard halted, vanished, to reappear in a broad muddy plain covered entirely with tents, booths, portable shops, vans, even desolate automobiles. There was visible a rough sort of plan; lanes ran between a double line of counters, to be met at right angles by other lanes; you could see that you really were in a market with the grey French sky for covering and the deep sticky mud beneath your feet. That mud! There is no mud I am convinced like unto French mud; it is black, it is viscous, it is thick, yet somehow it contrives to spatter and to penetrate and is“of a wetness”! But the clientele of the Marché aux Puces did not care about mud. Nor did I—there were far too many other things to consider. Not even in a big department store do I remember such a variety of objects. As far as I can recall there were no fruits or vegetables, nor indeed any edibles except some cough candy made from the dried berries of the eucalyptus tree. I bought some of this as a safeguard against the effects of the mud and as it tasted like a mixture of camphor and menthol I suppose it would hardly come in the category of edibles. But they were the only objects missing. Very often as I gaze around the interior of a large shop catering as modern stores do to an appreciable portion of the increasing number of our needs, I wonder what Adam and Eve would think if they might spy just once...

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