dy, noted the action of the massive English machinery directed to its
end, which had been in this case effectually to tame the presumptuous
and "work over" the crude. I remember on that occasion retracing my
steps from Eaton Square to Devonshire Street with a lively sense of
observation exercised by the way, a perfect gleaning of golden straws.
Our guide and philosopher of the summer days in Paris was no such
character as that; she had arrived among us full-fledged and consummate,
fortunately for the case altogether--as our mere candid humanity would
otherwise have had scant practical pressure to bring. Thackeray's novel
contains a plate from his own expressive hand representing Miss Sharp
lost in a cynical day-dream while her neglected pupils are locked in a
scrimmage on the floor; but the marvel of _our_ exemplar of the Becky
type was exactly that though her larger, her more interested and
sophisticated views had a range that she not only permitted us to guess
but agreeably invited us to follow almost to their furthest limits, we
never for a moment ceased to be aware of her solicitude. We might, we
must, so tremendously have bored her, but no ironic artist could have
caught her at any juncture in the posture of disgust: really, I imagine,
because her own ironies would have been too fine for him and too
numerous and too mixed. And this remarkable creature vouchsafed us all
information for the free enjoyment--on the terms proper to our tender
years--of her beautiful city.

It was not by the common measure then so beautiful as now; the second
Empire, too lately installed, was still more or less feeling its way,
with the great free hand soon to be allowed to Baron Haussmann marked as
yet but in the light preliminary flourish. Its connections with the
past, however, still hung thickly on; its majesties and symmetries,
comparatively vague and general, were subject to the happy accident, the
charming lapse and the odd extrusion, a bonhomie of chance composition
and colour now quite purged away. The whole region of the
Champs-Elysees, where we must after all at first have principally
prowled, was another world from the actual huge centre of repeated
radiations; the splendid Avenue, as we of course already thought it,
carried the eye from the Tuileries to the Arch, but pleasant old places
abutted on it by the way, gardens and terraces and hotels of another
time, pavilions still braver than ours, cabarets and cafes of homely,
a