of blue blossoms down the spouts; rare flowers, of minute proportions,
burst from the button-holes of the young horsemen going to the Bois;
the gloves of the American colony became lilac; hyacinths, daffodils
and pansies moved by wagon-loads over the streets and soared to
the windows of the sewing-girls. Overhead, in the steaming and
cloud-marbled blue, stood the April sun. "Apelles of the flowers," as
an old English writer has styled him, he was coloring the garden-beds
with his rarest enamels, and spreading a sheet of varied tints over
the steps of the Madeleine, where they hold the horticultural market.

[Illustration]

This sort of country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and
enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors,
and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old
binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing,
unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs
of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy. I fancied that wings were
sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, and that they were the volatile
wings of the moth or dragon-fly. But to establish myself at Marly
before the baron, would not that be a breach of compact? Would he
not make it a _casus belli_? Luckily, we were getting through April:
to-morrow it would be the twenty-eighth.

On that memorable morning the sun rose strong and bright, and
photographed a brilliant idea upon my cerebellum.

I would undertake a pedestrian attack upon Marly by winding my way
around the suburbs of the capital. What more appropriate, for a
profound geographer and tourist, than to measure with my walking-stick