Round the Sanctums.

Otago Witness, Issue 1417, 18 January 1879, Page 23

Round the Sanctums.

THE BRITISH PAPA AT THE PARIS EXHIBITION. "Jane! Suaan ! Bertha! Come along ! Why don't you come along ! Are you ever coming ?" Jane, Susan, Bertha, and the old lady turn reluctantly from those lovely flowers. Their pace toward paterfamilias is slow and hesitating. They want to stay and see it all. He wants to get to his hotel and enjoy his dinner. They have had but a taste of the Exposition. He is already surfeited and tired of it. He dozed for an hour on a circular plush« cushioned seat in the French dress department. In the matter of time, that was a windfall for the girls and their mother. Now the daughters have again caught up with their paternal convoy. He is addressing them. He talks rapidly and is very red in the face. The family umbrella in his hand goes up and down and makes side flourishes to the right and left. The family umbrella says a great deal. As we near him we make out the words, "go home to morrow if "—" — and the tramp of thousands of feet on the raised wooden flooring of the bridge, the hum of many voices, and the laugh of a gay French girl drowns the rest. He gets under weigh once more. The girls look momentarily sad and sorrowful. But new sights soon absorb their interest. They glanoe shyly at the moustached, dark-eyed men drinking amber- coloured fluids at the cafe Bodega or the Francais. They gaze also with a sort of shocked surprise and interest at the young ladies so much at home at these cafe tables. They are passing by the shores of, to them, a new world, a gay world, a wicked world. Yes, rather a wicked world. The last place they visited was the foreign picture galleries. The old gentleman stayed but five minutes, and then hustled his family out. He has an old-fashioned, sturdy, English opinion about pictures, and thinks they should be dressed up. His old British inherited opinions of the French have all been realised within the last twenty-four hours, Don't talk art to him. He knows better. The vexed and hungry British papa gets at last with his convoy outside the grounds. It is nearly half-past 5. It is the time for everybody's emergence. The rush home is under full headway. Gars are f nil, boats are full, cabs are full. Hundreds are waiting on the sidewalk. The British papa sees a route to the gangway of a river boat He directs thither his course. His eldest daughter, who has a faint glimmering of the French language and usages, tries to tell him that he cannot get on board. He heeds her not. He is deaf to these girls who have dilly-dallied and delayed him all the day. He passes by a long file of people three or four deep. It is the queue. They regard him curiously. Some call out to him sarcastically in French, He strides onward. He scorns them. An English voice shouts, "I say, old fellow, you can't get on board that way. You must take your turn with the rest of us, you know." The indignant father strides onward. The eldest girl half sobs, " Why won't Pa mind what they say ?" But Pa won't. A fiercely moustached policeman now confronts Pa. He ( will not allow him to pass further. He shouts French at him authoritatively, and waves him back. Pa must stop. Pa must take his place in the file of hundreds waitiug for the boat. Pa won't do any such thing. His British blood is up at being so bullied by a Gaul. He will seek some other route to his hotel. He will try the omnibus. He hails one. It is full, and rumbles on. Ha hails another in English. The family umbrella waves imperatively for it to stop. It is full, and rumbles on^ "You must go to the station, Pa, and gel; a number," says the eldest daughter, who has learned this through her friend's letters from Paris. Pa blunders to the omnibus station. But he won't get a number which will give him a chance at last to enter an omnibus homeward bound. He waits with his tired brood on the kerb. He presses towards the next arrived omnibus. A crowd precede him, all with white or green tickets in their uplifted hands. Pa presses through the waiting throng and essays to mount the omnibus steps. Pa is immediately shoved off by the Gallic conductor. Yet there is plenty of room inside. He expostulates in English. He won't learn a word of French. He would not condescend to speak their beggarly gibberish. There is a great shouting and calling out of numbers— vingt-qiutre ! vingt cinq ! yingt seis ! vingt-sept ! Four people holding the littlo white tickets shove by him, and fill up the only vacmt places. Pa and family cannot enter. The omnibus roUa off. Pa execrates French omnibusses and France. There is no sense, system or method in their ways. He is even profane. Again his eldest daughter essays an explanation. She tries to tell him that he must secure a numbered ticket. Pa will hear no explanation. " It's the system here," says the girl. He doesn't care if it is the syttem. He doesn't want to learn the system, "It's a beggarly system. Why don't they do things here in an honest, straightforward English way, without all this circumlocution, palaver and bluster?" The distressed and now thoroughly wearied British family wait and wait on the kerb. This is a day of 00,000 admissions to the Expoeition, aud of this number 20,000 at least emerge by the Trocadero gates. There is no end to the emerging crowd. It is dark. The British family walk two miles to their hotel. Table d'hote dinner is over when they arrive. Only the scraps are left. The eldest daughter is sad, the youngest in tears, Ma is a wilted plant and Pa is rab d. The Exposition ! becomes an apple of Sodom. — Pi entice Mul. ford in the San Francisco Bulletin.