“Yes,” replied I, remarking for the first time the cross that decorated his little coat; “and I see that you are head-boy!”

“Monsieur Charles helps me to learn, and so I am come to be the first in the class.”

“Are you now going to your lessons?”

“Yes, and he has given me some lilacs; for he has a garden where we play together, and where my mother can always have flowers.”

“Then it is the same as if it were partly your own.”

“So it is!  Ah! they are good neighbors indeed.  But here I am; good-by, sir.”

He nodded to me with a smile, and disappeared.

I went on with my walk, still pensive, but with a feeling of relief.  If I had elsewhere witnessed the painful contrast between affluence and want, here I had found the true union of riches and poverty.  Hearty good-will had smoothed down the more rugged inequalities on both sides, and had opened a road of true neighborhood and fellowship between the humble workshop and the stately mansion.  Instead of hearkening to the voice of interest, they had both listened to that of self-sacrifice, and there was no place left for contempt or envy.  Thus, instead of the beggar in rags, that I had seen at the other door cursing the rich man, I had found here the happy child of the laborer loaded with flowers and blessing him!  The problem, so difficult and so dangerous to examine into with no regard but for the rights of it, I had just seen solved by love.

CHAPTER V

COMPENSATION

Sunday, May 27th

Capital cities have one thing peculiar to them:  their days of rest seem to be the signal for a general dispersion and flight.  Like birds that are just restored to liberty, the people come out of their stone cages, and joyfully fly toward the country.  It is who shall find a green hillock for a seat, or the shade of a wood for a shelter; they gather May flowers, they run about the fields; the town is forgotten until the evening, when they return with sprigs of blooming hawthorn in their hats, and their hearts gladdened by pleasant thoughts and recollections of the past day; the next day they return again to their harness and to work.

These rural adventures are most remarkable at Paris.  When the fine weather comes, clerks, shop keepers, and workingmen look forward impatiently for the Sunday as the day for trying a few hours of this pastoral life; they walk through six miles of grocers’ shops and public-houses in the faubourgs, in the sole hope of finding a real turnip-field.  The father of a family begins the practical education of his son by showing him wheat which has not taken the form of a loaf, and cabbage “in its wild state.”  Heaven only knows the encounters, the discoveries, the adventures that are met with!  What Parisian has not had his Odyssey in an excursion through the suburbs, and would not be able to write a companion to the famous Travels by Land and by Sea from Paris to St. Cloud?