Page:Love and Learn (1924).pdf/158

 ness and we fled to France to escape the well-meant pestering of Fighting Paddy Leary.

Really, I don't blame the gamesters who try to swim the English Channel, as I'm satisfied that method has it all over the trip via boat! If there's anything rougher than that dizzy body of water separating England from France, then Dempsey had better not fight it! Honest to Kansas, we led the life of a tennis ball on that voyage across—just tossed all over the place. I wanted to go by plane, but Hazel objects to them because they go up in the air. Anyhow, we finally made the perilous journey and landed in the country made famous by Sarah Bernhardt, Joan of Arc, Anna Held, Napoleon, "Couvert $1.50" and sliced potatoes dipped in boiling grease. Our next imitation was to board a train for art's home town, and of course the minute we stepped out of the Gare St.—Lazaire, Hazel pulls that ancient gag first breathed admiringly by Helen of Troy, viz., "So this is Paris!"

This was our original visit to gay Paree and in spite of the fact that we'd both invested in Baedekers and copies of "French in a Twinkling," we were as strange as a pair of deck-hands in a drawing room. Honestly, we didn't know what it was all about and couldn't tell a franc from a doubloon, oo la la from n'est-ce pas, or ros' biff from vin ordinaire. However, we fitted a taxi around us and bounded over to a hotel I picked out