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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?”

The accent of primitive fidelity was perfect.  I observed casually, “I am going on a little journey of thirty-six hours, and alone.  You can pack everything up, and go on to Marly as usual.  You may go to-morrow.”

“Shall I not go along with monsieur, then?” repeated Charles, with a turn for tautology not now for the first time manifested.

“What for?  Am I a child?”

“Surely not—­on the contrary.  But, though Monsieur Paul has a sure foot and a good eye, and is not to say getting old, yet when a person is fifty it is not best for a person to run about the streets as if a person was a young person.”

It was Josephine who did me the honor to address me the last remark.

I confess to but forty-five years of age; Hohenfels, quite erroneously, gives me forty-eight; Josephine, with that raw alacrity in leaping at computations peculiar to the illiterate, oppressed me with fifty.  Which of us three knew best?  I should like to ask.  But it is of little consequence.  The Easterns generally vaunt themselves on not knowing the day of their birth.  And wisdom comes to us from the East.

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I decided, for reasons sufficient to myself, to get out of Paris by the opposite side.  I determined to make my sortie by way of the Temple Market and the Belleville abattoirs.  On the thirtieth of April, at an ambitiously early hour, wearing my gardening cap, with my sketch-book sticking out of my pocket, my tin box in one hand and my stout stick in the other, I emerged among the staring porters of the neighboring houses, and it was in this equipment that I received the renewed lamentations of Charles and Josephine.