e ins and outs of the shallow Seine! those banks
of pollard willows, where girls in white caps tended flocks of geese
and turkeys, and where, every silver-spangled morning, the shore was
a landscape by Corot, and every twilight a landscape by Daubigny! How
exquisite these pictures became to my mind as I thought them forth one
by one, leaning over a grimy pavement in the peculiar sultriness of
the year's first warmth!

"Quick, Charles! my tin botany-box."

I could be at Marly on the first of May at the dinner hour as
punctually as Hohenfels--before him, maybe. And after what a range of
delicious experience! How he would envy me!

"Is monsieur going to travel all alone?" said keen old Charles, taking
the alarm in a minute. "Why am I not to go along with monsieur?"

The accent of primitive fidelity was perfect. I observed casually, "I
am going on a little journey of thirty-six hours, and alone. You
can pack everything up, and go on to Marly as usual. You may go
to-morrow."

"Shall I not go along with monsieur, then?" repeated Charles, with a
turn for tautology not now for the first time manifested.

"What for? Am I a child?"

"Surely not--on the contrary. But, though Monsieur Paul has a sure
foot and a good eye, and is not to say getting old, yet when a person
is fifty it is not best for a person to run about the streets as if a
person was a young person."

It was Josephine who did me the honor to address me the last remark.

I confess to but forty-five years of age; Hohenfels, quite
erroneously, gives me forty-eight; Josephine, with that raw alacrity
in leaping at computations peculiar to the illiterate, oppressed me
with fifty. Which of us three knew best? I should like to ask. But it
is of little consequence. The Easterns generally vaunt themselves on
not knowing the day of their birth. And wisdom comes to us from the
East.

[Illustration]

I decided, for reasons sufficient to myself, to get out of Paris by
the opposite side. I determined to make my sortie by way of the Temple
Market and the Belleville abattoirs. On the thirtieth of April, at an
ambitiously early hour, wearing my gardening cap, with my sketch-book
sticking out of my pocket, my tin box in one hand and my stout stick
in the other, I emerged among the staring porters of the neighboring
houses, and it was in this equipment that I received the renewed
lamentations of Charles and Josephine.

[Illustration]

"Will you dare to go along the Bou