delicately plunged them here and there in his colour-box, that spoke a
master. So intent was he upon his work that, when I came up behind him,
he seemed unaware of my presence; though his oblivion was actually the
conscious indifference of a landscape painter, accustomed to the ambling
cow and the awe-struck peasant looking over his shoulder as he worked.

"Great bunch of weeds," he said presently, without looking up, and still
painting, drawing the while at a quaint pipe about an inch long.

"O, you are not the Boul' Miche, after all," I exclaimed in
disappointment.

"Aren't I, though?" he said at last, looking up in interested surprise.
"Ever at--?" mentioning the name of a well-known cafe, one of the many
rally-points of the Quartier.

"I should say," I answered.

"Well!"

And thereupon we both plunged into delighted reminiscence of that city
which, as none other, makes immediate friends of all her lovers. For a
while the woods faded away, and in that tangled clearing rose the towers
of Notre Dame, and the Seine glittered on under its great bridges, and
again the world smelled of absinthe, and picturesque madmen gesticulated
in clouds of tobacco smoke, and propounded fantastic philosophies amid
the rattle of dominoes--and afar off in the street a voice was crying
"_Haricots verts_!" My new friend's talk had the pathos of spiritual
exile, for, as French in blood as a man could be, born in Bordeaux of
Provençal parentage, he had lived most of his life in America. The