The Barrel-Organ.
FRANÇOIS COPPÉE.
I
WHAT mournful memories music brings up! How sad are the recollections of other days that it evokes! And how the tears rise in our eyes in the gathering twilight of November, at the wailing of the barrel-organ, as it plays some long-forgotten polka!
An old, old polka that used to set all Paris dancing fifteen years ago, when the number of your years was eighteen, madame, or thereabout! Yes! you, poor, faded blonde, who are wearing a blue velvet hat that only looks the shabbier for having new strings, and are wheeling your baby—the third, it is—in his little carriage, beneath the leafless lindens that border the cheerless boulevard of the suburban quarter where you live.
How pretty you were in the days when the band used to play that polka at all the bourgeois frolics, with their refreshments of stale cake and glasses of sweetened water! How like you were to a bright spring morning, with the pure oval of your face that
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