I felt the same delight, the same liberty.  Something like the heavy strap of a slave seemed to break behind me as I found myself quite clear of the metropolis.  Mad schemes of unanticipated journeys danced through my head; I might amble on to Villemonble, Montfermeil, Raincy, or even to the Forest of Bondy, so dear to the experimental botanist.  Had I not two days before me ere my compact with Hohenfels at Marly?  And in two days you can go from Paris to Florence.  Meantime, from the effects of famine, my ribs were sinking down upon the pelvic basin of my frame.

The walk, the open air, the sight of the fowl, whose beak now burned into my bosom’s core, had sharpened my appetite beyond bearing.  Yet how could I eat without some drop of cider or soft white wine to drink?  Besides, slave of convention that I have grown, I no longer understand the business of eating without its concomitants—­a shelter and something to sit on.

The plain became wearisome.  There are two things the American-born, however long a resident abroad, never forgives the lack of in Europe.  The first I miss when I am in Paris:  it is the perpetual street-mending of an American town.  Here the boulevards, smeared with asphaltum or bedded with crunched macadam, attain smoothness without life:  you travel on scum.  But in the dear old American streets the epidermis is vital:  what strength and mutual reliance in the cobbles as they stand together in serried ranks, like so many eye-teeth!  How they are perpetually sinking into prodigious ruts, along which the ponderous drays are forced to dance on one wheel in a paroxysm of agony and critical equipoise!  But the perpetual state of street-mending, that is the crowning interest.  What would I not sometimes give to exchange the Swiss sweeping-girls, plying their long brooms desolately in the mud, for the paviors’ hammers of America, which play upon the pebbles like a carillon of muffled bells?  As for the other lack, it is the want of wooden bridges.  Far away in my native meadows gleams the silver Charles:  the tramp of horses’ hoofs comes to my ear from the timbers of the bridge. Here, with a pelt and a scramble your bridge is crossed:  nothing addresses the heart from its stony causeway.  But the low, arched tubes of wood that span the streams of my native land are so many bass-viols, sending out mellow thunders with every passing wagon to blend with the rustling stream and the sighing woods.  Shall I never hear them again?

A reminiscence more than ten years old came to give precision to my ramblings in the past.  Beyond the rustic pathway I was now following I could perceive the hills of Trou-Vassou.  Hereabouts, if memory served me, I might find a welcome, almost a home, and the clasp of cordial if humble hands.  Here I might find folks who would laugh when I arrived, and would be glad to share their luncheon with me But—­ten years gone by!

[Illustration:  The two chickens.]