he town in which they had
been brought up, and where their family had been so long rooted that
their circle of friends and relatives gave them playmates and
companions in plenty, they found themselves very lonely in Paris,
where they were reduced for a good part of the time to such amusement
as they could find in the narrow quarters of their rooms on the sixth
floor of an apartment-house. It is not the custom in Paris for the
children, even of the poor, to make a playground of the street, and
our little ones had nobody to walk out with them but an old servant
who had come with them from Bordeaux, and who was ill-fitted, for all
her virtues, to take a mother's place to the children. She was honest
and faithful, but like all of her class, she liked routine and order,
and she could make no allowances for the restlessness of her
bright-minded charge. Rosa was her especial torment; the black sheep
of the brood. Household tasks she despised, and study, as it was
pursued in the successive schools to which her despairing father sent
her, had no charms for her. Her best playmates were animals; the
horses and dogs she saw in the streets and which she fearlessly
accosted; the sheep that found itself queerly lodged on the top floor
of a city house; and the parrot which, as we have seen, was not only
her playmate but her schoolmaster.

There came a time when the charge of such a child, so averse to rules
and so given to strange ways of passing her time, became too much for
the old servant with her orthodox views of life, and she persuaded
Rosa's father to put her as a day-scholar with the nuns at Chaillot, a
small suburb of Paris. How it happened that she was allowed to go back
and forth alone, between home and school, we do not know; but it is
not to be wondered at if she were irregular in her hours; if, one day,
she set the nuns wondering why she did not appear at school-opening,
and another day put the old servant into a twitter because she did not
come home in season. The truth was, she had found that there was
something better in Paris than streets and shops and tall houses; she
had discovered a wood there, a veritable forest, with trees, and pools
of water, and birds, and wild flowers, and though this enchanted spot
which citizens called the Bois de Boulogne--not then a formal park as
it is to-day--was off the road to Chaillot, yet it was not so far that
she need fear getting lost in going there or in coming back. No
wonder,