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“There is something else he appreciates also, and reveres. And here especially we find that his paternal affection for all children, his courtesy and good-fellowship with all classes, his sense of proprietorship and delight and pride in public gardens do not indicate only a happy and amiable disposition, but spring from a deeper sentiment. He is sauntering on the boulevards, it may be, with Edouard. The time is summer—there is sunshine everywhere; the trees are in bloom, the streets are full of movement and noise, fiacres rattle, tram-horns sound, camelots cry, gamins whistle. Suddenly there is a temporary lull. A slow procession passes, a hearse buried in flowers; mourners on foot follow, the near relatives, bareheaded, walking two by two; after them come, it may be, a long line of carriages; it may be, one forlorn fiacre. It does not matter. For the Parisian, a rich funeral or a poor one is never an indifferent spectacle; never simply an unavoidable, disagreeable interruption of traffic, to be got out of sight, and out of the way of the busy world as quickly as possible. Here is one of those ordinary circumstances when the Parisian’s attention to the courtesies of social life is the outward and visible sign of his self-respecting humanity and fraternal sympathy. His hat is off, and held off—so is Edouard’s cap, so are the caps of even younger children, for from the age of four upwards each gosse knows what is due from him on such an occasion. Cochers are bareheaded, boulevard loafers also; the bourgeois stops stirring his absinthe to salute; many a woman crosses herself and mutters a prayer. ‘Farewell!’ ‘God bless thee!’ The kind and pious leave-taking of the Parisian enjoying to-day’s sunshine to the Parisian of yesterday whose place to-morrow will know him no more, accompanies the procession step by step on its way to the cemetery of Père Lachaise or Montparnasse....