We live just round the corner from Seek Midday Street, but it is our metropolis. Our own little street is reserved, its tall house fronts contain but barred windows and portes cochères, it is a passage-way between privacies. Here humanity withdraws itself, while in Seek Midday Street the humanities are spread abroad. Shop - fronts flaunt, and shopkeepers smile welcome; the motor omnibuses charge lumberingly over the rough pavé; street hawkers desert their barrows-filled with the spoils of Spanish gardens or of Canaries' groves-they discuss over a glass of pinard in the bistro; cabs reel recklessly to the danger of the pedestrian; and the melancholy squeaker of the chairmender makes weird music through the din.

I feel that Seek Midday Street can vie for strangeness of christening with any of the queerly-named streets of Paris, though for sure some of the names are queer enough. The French do not disdain a poetic or a descriptive touch. I like the street of "Beautiful Leaves," or that of "A Drop of Gold," or "The Little Street of Lilac," "The Basket of Flowers," "The White Peacock," "The Little Fathers," "The Valley of Grace," "The Old Pigeon House," "Doll

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Street," North Pole Street," "The Street of the White Queen," and so on. Truth and Paradise are but passages, there is also a passage of Hell and a passage of Sighs. Health is only an impasse, and so, appropriately enough, is "Rothschild." But the prize street names of Paris are perhaps The Street of the Mule's March," "The Street of the Wolves' Breach," and "The Street of the Fishing Cat," if one excepts the "New Street of Cannon - balls." Amongst these names our Seek Midday Street takes no inconspicuous place, and is perhaps for the ignorant the most puzzling to set an origin to. Midi in French, as well as midday, means the cardinal south, or the southerly provinces of France, or colloquially chercher midi a quatorze heures is the equivalent of "crying before you are hurt." So that amongst too many possible meanings we would be in danger of getting lost, had not the old sundial maker's sign survived from which the street has derived its name. It is a pity that Hazlitt did not espy this old sign; he would have slipped it into his piece upon the sundial, though, indeed, the old sundial maker depicted would hardly have fitted the essayist's

Up there he is limned eternally, day or night, wet or shine, serene or gusty, hunting with stretched callipers for that midday, to be found no more than Keats' Arcadian lover might achieve the half-shaped kiss. For ever he seeks midday as persistently as a philosopher pursues the phantom truth. He should be canonised: Saint Cherche-Midi, patron of Utopists.

But the street heeds him not; now and again some pedestrian archæologist with uplifted stick may point him out, now and again some sparrow will perch upon his ledge, but in general the godfather of the street goes on quietly seeking, till the day shall come for his translation from the hurly-burly of these new times to the calm recesses of a museum and to the honour of an explanatory tombstone.

No, the street doesn't heed him; it does not seek midday, except perhaps as an interlude, which the rich odours of the pot-au-feu and the clink of the aperitif glass announce alluringly. It seeks rather seven o'clock when the shutters go up; it seeks but the cessation of the one day's toil, little caring, during a few evening hours of leisure, that toil begins again to-morrow; it doesn't seek midday but rather midnight, not the clear light of knowledge, but the reposing shadows of nescience. It is, indeed, better so; fancy having to buy one's

or to purchase sausages from a theorist in Utopia.

Yet who am I to be so positive; the French are a queerly intellectual race. Can I answer for the baker? Why, I have never seen him. His wife serves in the shop, and he might live at the bottom of a well with Truth herself, for all I can swear.

With the sausage-maker I feel on safer ground. He cannot deal in Utopias . . . and yet—. There's something about the sausage-maker which reminds me of the French Revolution. He is Defarge, of the Tale of Two Cities,' a black and red man, black hair, red cheeks, black eyes, red hands, and a lusty joviality; the laughing man of the street. Yet clap a bonnet of liberty on his head, and he would split you with his long knife as nonchalantly as he slices ham. And the revolutionists, sans culottes and all, did set out to make Utopia. So I'll not answer for the sausage - maker, on second thoughts.

His wife, a serene beautiful woman, plump and motherly, without children, was a shorthand-typist. In England it is difficult to imagine our buxom young typist retreating complacently from the clerkly table to the desk of a sausage shop. We are not a nation of shopkeepers, we are a nation which despises shopkeeping. I discovered the former profession of the Charcutière by chance. In paying my account for some

"After all," said the Charcutière, one has one's little position, you know she wiped her meat-stained fingers on her apron,-" and then, to be mistress of one's own place has its gratifications, monsieur."

What delectable things they keep in their cleanly shop, bright tins of sardines, of tunny, of fois gras, of little peas built into pyramids; coils of sausages, Frankfort, Strasburg, Andouillette-Lilliputian sausage cheek by jowl with Brobdingnagian sausage; a mounting line of pâtés culminating in the noble hams, Paris or York; olives glimmering through glass jars, saur kraut lurking in its tub, rilettes de La Sarthe and

Harang de Norvège-the luxuries of the season and none of the necessities.

Last spring the shop was new painted, and all the artist clients were consulted with some anxiety. Should it be dark green with an orange stripe, or should it be black with a red ornament? Dark green won the favour, but then the exact shade. Thoughtful sausagemaker. We took his advice about sausages; he submitted to our judgment about colour. We accorded him a meet seriousness. A more reckless man would have blundered along, and would have had his shop any old tint.

Seek Midday Street makes life very easy for us casual artistic folk. It takes off our hands the careful worry of the housekeeper and the labour of the kitchen. If you want soup, a five minutes' jaunt with an earthen jug to the bistro-restaurant supplies you with an excellent bouillon; for your hors d'œuvres our sausage - maker offers his plenitudes; a word to the oyster-stall, and Portugaises or marennes, claires or vertes, come ready opened, garnished with lemon sweetened with the smile of a girlish messenger. The baker, for sixty centimes, will roast you any dish, and you can buy all your vegetables prepared and cooked for less than you would waste in time, trouble, and femme de menage. If you dislike the contemplative labour of the coffee-mill, the folk at

the dairy will fresh grind your coffee as you wait. With ten minutes' forethought your dinner makes itself, and that with less extra expense than you would pay for the coal in the kitchener.

But it is not only the material comfort, the simplicity of existence which attracts us to Seek Midday Street, it is rather the humanities. The Street is no mere street of shopkeepers, it is a street of personalities. To every purchase there is attached a bon prime. If you buy in the bazaars or in the co-operative stalls, you can gain bon primes, ten of which entitle you to a baby's rattle, thirty to a knife and fork, one hundred and twenty to a dinner service, one thousand to a mantelpiece clock, and so on. Once Jo was attracted by this method of getting something for nothing, and collected bon primes from the large grocer's around the corner. For two hundred coupons she received a set of cutlery which was of excellent appearance, but which had the habit, very irritating in cutlery, of curling up if one tried to cut anything. Our bon primes are more subtle and more satisfying. They are merely little glimpses of personality, little hints of humanity or of interest, as we pass from shop to shop. After all, I believe we English are a nation of shopkeepers; at least our shopkeeper is a shopkeeper, the French are a nation of human beings keeping shops.

You may retort, but I don't

want my shopkeeper to be a human being; he would be a nuisance. Tant pis pour vous. You spend some time reading magazines for your amusement, why not read shopkeepers both for amusement and for humanity. During the war a Serbian professor said to me, "I think that the English have a more profound sense of the gregarious, the art of living in a crowd, than any other nation in Europe. When I first came to England, and I hear every one saying, 'Good-day, fine weather,' I think to myself, 'What imbecility. Good-day, fine weather, indeed. Pah! I live in a hotel. Whenever I go up or down I say something to the lift boy. In time I find that I have used up all my ordinary thoughts upon the lift boy, and I must puzzle to find something appropriate to say to the lift boy. Then I find that the lift boy occupies too much of my thoughts. Then Eureka! it dawns on me. 'Good day, fine weather.' What could be better. It expresses my common humanity with the lift boy, it relieves my brain. 'Good morning, fine weather,' to the lift boy. Oh yes! The English are a very subtle nation. They are not understood, not in the least. But I have understood them. 'Good-morning, sir, good-morning to you. Parfait.''

I fear that our professor was but an egoist after all. He was concerned with his relations to the lift boy, he must say something new to the lift boy each

I like to think of Yorick's interview with the glove-maker's wife in the 'Sentimental Journey.' Had we a glove-maker in our street I am sure that I could point you out the very shop where it occurred, so well has he caught the general humour of French shopkeeping. Sterne's glove-maker is not a particular, she is a universal, and even allowing for the social upheavals since his day, she has changed in temperament and in technique not a jot. But though we cannot give you a glove-maker, I must present to you a few of our other tradesfolk.

If Paris is to be remarkable for one thing, and you had asked me what that one thing was, I would point out her cats. The architect will suggest her deep vistas of perspective, the painter her ordered pleasure gardens, the provincial will talk of the Boulevard and of the Butte de Montmartre, the archæologist of her Gothic palaces, the gourmet of her "Silver Towers." I choose her cats; de gustibus non est disputandum. The merid

ional is not held to be an animal lover, yet I would wager that in no town of the world is the cat so esteemed as in Paris; indeed, should you possess a rare or a valuable cat, a blue Persian or a Siamese or a Manx, you will be wise to air it on a leash; a Parisian is no more to be trusted with a cat than a nigger with a fowl. The Paris cat is large, sleek and cosy; some far back strain of Persian has dowered even the veriest gutter tramp with a coat of silken texture as though the Paris cat, like the grisette, carries all her wealth upon her back. In almost every shop window on a warm day you will see the Paris cat asleep; in the Teinturiere's she coils up amongst the new - dyed blouses of the economical; in the sausage-maker's she sprawls on the sardine-tins; the cast shop displays a live cat amidst the stiff and pallid plasters. You will find her companioning wine bottles, Japanese curios, corsets, cabbages, antiques, bicycles, lingerie, literature, art materials, jewellery, wireless, or clocks and watches; no shop front-I talk of shops, not of emporiums-no shop front, I say, is complete without its somnolent cat.

Yet this Parisian love of the cat can be a selfish-nay, a heartless love. Madame Rochelle, our groceress, is often indignant with the family which, travelling to other parts, can