that enormous bed of gypsum, at the centre of which, like a bee in a
sugar-basin, Paris sits and hums?

[Illustration]

The notion gained upon me. Perhaps it was the natural reaction from
the Mountains of the Moon; but in my then state of mind no prospect
could appear more delicious than a long tramp among the quiet scenes
through which the city fringes itself off into rurality. Those suburbs
of blank convent walls! those curves of the Seine and the Marne,
blocked with low villages, whose walls of white, stained with tender
mould and tiled with brown, dipped their placid reflections into the
stream! those droll square boats, pushing out from the sedges to urge
you across the ferry! those long rafts of lumber, following, like
cunning crocodiles, the 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?"