Now and again at intervals I accompanied him on his afternoon walks.  These generally took a semi-circular form.  We descended from the plateau of Upper Norwood on one side to climb to it again on another.  Sometimes we passed by way of Beulah Spa, then round by some fields and a recreation ground, with the name of which I am not acquainted.  There were several shapely oak trees thereabouts, which he greatly admired and even photographed.

‘Do you know,’ he remarked to me one afternoon, ’when I come out all alone for my usual constitutional, and want to shake off some worrying thoughts, I often amuse myself by counting the number of hairpins which I see lying on the foot-pavement.  Oh! you need not laugh, it is very curious, I assure you.  I already had ideas for two essays—­one on the capital “I” in its relation to the English character, and another on the physiology of the English “guillotine” window and the forms it affects, not forgetting the circumstance that whenever an architect introduces a French window into an English house, it invariably opens outwardly so as to be well buffeted by the wind, instead of into the room as it should do.  Well, now I am beginning to think that I might write something on the carelessness of Englishwomen in fastening up their hair, and the phenomenal consumption of hairpins in England.  For the consumption must be enormous since the loss is so great, as I will show you.’

Then he proceeded to ocular demonstration.  As we walked on for half an hour or so, principally along roads bordered by the umbrageous gardens of villa residences, we counted all the hairpins we could see.  There were about four dozen.  And he was careful to point out that we had chiefly followed a route where there was but a moderate amount of traffic.

Not one man in a thousand probably would have thought of counting the lost hairpins in the streets; but then M. Zola is an observer, and if I tell this anecdote, which some may think puerile, it is by way of illustrating his powers of observation and the length to which he occasionally carries them.

On one point, I told him, he was rather in the wrong.  The great loss of hairpins did not proceed so much from the carelessness of women in fastening their hair, as from their ‘pennywise and pound-foolish’ system of buying cheap hairpins with few and inefficient ‘twists.’  These cheap hairpins never ‘caught’ properly in their coiled-up tresses.  The women went out, walked rapidly, tossed their heads perchance, and one at least of their hairpins fell to the ground.  Supposing one hundred women passed along a certain road or street in the course of the day, it would not be surprising to find that at least thirty hairpins were lost there.  And I concluded by saying that, to the best of my belief, the aforesaid hairpins were ‘made in Germany.’