_cabarets_ when the diligence comes and goes. Somewhere, there must
be a gendarme with a cocked hat and a sword on, standing with folded arms
to represent the Empire and Peace among that rural population; if I looked
in-doors, I am sure I should see the neatest of landladies and landladies'
daughters and nieces in high black silk caps, bearing hither and thither
smoking bowls of _bouillon_ and _cafe-au-lait_. Well, it takes
as little to make one happy as miserable, thank Heaven! and I derive a
cheerfulness from this scene which quite atones to me for the fleeting
desolation suffered from the sunny verdure on the railroad bank. With
repaired spirits I take my way up through the brick-yards towards the
Irish settlement on the north, passing under the long sheds that shelter
the kilns. The ashes lie cold about the mouths of most, and the bricks are
burnt to the proper complexion; in others these are freshly arranged over
flues in which the fire has not been kindled; but in whatever state I see
them, I am reminded of brick-kilns of boyhood. They were then such palaces
of enchantment as any architect should now vainly attempt to rival with
bricks upon the most desirable corner lot of the Back Bay, and were the
homes of men truly to be envied: men privileged to stay up all night; to
sleep, as it were, out of doors; to hear the wild geese as they flew over
in the darkness; to be waking in time to shoot the early ducks that
visited the neighboring ponds; to roast corn upon the ends of sticks; to
tell and to listen to stories that never ended, save in some sudden
impulse to rise and dance a happy hoe-down in the ruddy light of the kiln-
fires. If by day they were seen to have the redness of eyes of men that
looked upon the whiskey when it was yellow and gave its color in the
flask; if now and then the fragments of a broken bottle strewed the scene
of their vigils, and a head broken to match appeared among those good
comrades, the boyish imagination was not shocked by these things, but
accepted them merely as the symbols of a free virile life. Some such life
no doubt is still to be found in the Dublin to which I am come by the time