s under his own roof; as if
indeed, I remember reflecting, we could, such as we were, have been
desired to share his foreign interests--such as _they_ were. He espoused
our cause, however, with gay goodnature--while I wondered, in my
admiration for him and curiosity about him, how he really liked us, and
(a bit doubtfully) whether I should have liked us had I been in his
place; and after some further adventure installed us at the Hotel de la
Ville de Paris in the Rue de la Ville-l'Eveque, a resort now long since
extinct, though it lingered on for some years, and which I think of as
rather huddled and disappointingly private, to the abatement of
spectacle, and standing obliquely beyond a wall, a high gateway and a
more or less cobbled court.

XXII

Little else of that Parisian passage remains with me--it was probably of
the briefest; I recover only a visit with my father to the Palais de
l'Industrie, where the first of the great French Exhibitions, on the
model, much reduced, of the English Crystal Palace of 1851, was still
open, a fact explaining the crowded inns; and from that visit win back
but the department of the English pictures and our stopping long before
The Order of Release of a young English painter, J. E. Millais, who had
just leaped into fame, and my impression of the rare treatment of whose
baby's bare legs, pendent from its mother's arms, is still as vivid to
me as if from yesterday. The vivid yields again to the vague--I scarce
know why so utterly--till consciousness, waking up in London, renews
itself, late one evening and very richly, at the Gloucester Hotel (or
Coffee-House, as I think it was then still called,) which occupied that
corner of Piccadilly and Berkeley Street where more modern
establishments have since succeeded it, but where a fatigued and
famished American family found on that occasion a fine old British
virtue in cold roast beef and bread and cheese and ale; their expert
acclamation of which echoes even now in my memory. It keeps company
there with other matters equally British and, as we say now, early
Victorian; the thick gloom of the inn rooms, the faintness of the
glimmering tapers, the blest inexhaustibility of the fine joint,
surpassed only by that of the grave waiter's reserve--plain, immutably
plain fare all, but prompting in our elders an emphasis of relief and
relish, the "There's nothing like it after all!" tone, which re-excited
expectation, which in fact seemed t