FROM PARIS TO MARLY BY WAY OF THE RHINE.

II.--THE TWO CHICKENS.


[Illustration: THE FLOWERS OF WAR.]

"Thou art no less a man because thou wearest no hauberk nor mail sark,
and goest not on horseback after foolish adventures."

So I said, reassuring myself, thirty years ago, when, as Paul Flemming
the Blond, I was meditating the courageous change of cutting off my
soap-locks, burning my edition of Bulwer and giving my satin stocks to
my shoemaker: I mean, when I was growing up--or, in the more beauteous
language of that day, when Flemming was passing into the age of
bronze, and the flowers of Paradise were turning to a sword in his
hands.

Well, I say it again, and I say it with boldness, you can wear a tin
botany-box as bravely as a hauberk, and foolish adventures can be
pursued equally well on foot.

Stout, grizzled and short winded, I am just as nimble as ever in the
pretty exercise of running down an illusion. Yet I must confess, as I
passed the abattoirs of La Villette, whence blue-smocked butcher-boys
were hauling loads of dirty sheepskins, I could not but compare myself
to the honest man mentioned in one of Sardou's comedies: "The good
soul escaped out of a novel of Paul de Kock's, lost in the throng
on the Boulevard Malesherbes, and asking the way to the woods of