Then it all became rather tiresome and intermittent and confused, till
we reached at dusk next day a quay by a broad river; and as we drove
along it, under thick trees, we met other red and blue and green lamped
five-horsed diligences starting on their long journey just as ours was
coming to an end.

Then I knew (because I was a well-educated little boy, and heard my
father exclaim, "Here's Paris at last!") that we had entered the capital
of France--a fact that impressed me very much--so much, it seems, that I
went to sleep for thirty-six hours at a stretch, and woke up to find
myself in the garden I have mentioned, and to retain possession of that
self without break or solution of continuity (except when I went to
sleep again) until now.

* * * * *

The happiest day in all my outer life!

For in an old shed full of tools and lumber at the end of the garden,
and half-way between an empty fowl-house and a disused stable (each an
Eden in itself) I found a small toy-wheelbarrow--quite the most
extraordinary, the most unheard of and undreamed of, humorously,
daintily, exquisitely fascinating object I had ever come across in all
my brief existence.

I spent hours--enchanted hours--in wheeling brick-bats from the stable
to the fowl-house, and more enchanted hours in wheeling them all back
again, while genial French workmen, who were busy in and out of the
house where we were to live, stopped every now and then to ask
good-natured questions of the "p'tit Anglais," and commend his knowledge