ed up but carried them back in their arms to the hotel, stopping in
the _Avenue de l'Opera_ to wind up the mill and see the wheel go round
again. And as they stood enchanted, the mill wheel turning and turning,
who should come towards them but the _cher Maitre_. It was too late to
run, too late to hide the mill with its turning wheel and the dog with
its foolish drum. They longed to sink through the ground in their
mortification--they, the serious students of yesterday, to be caught
to-day playing like silly children in the open street. But how
ineffable is the condescension of the great! The master joined them.

"_Tiens_," he said, "and the wheel, it goes round? But it works
beautifully. Let us wind it up again!"

Cannot you see the little comedy,--the fine old prophet with the red
ribbon in his button-hole, the two trembling, adoring students, the toy
with its revolving wheel, all in the gay sunlight of the _Avenue de
l'Opera_, and not a passer-by troubling to look because it was Paris
where men are not ashamed to be themselves. The two painters preserved
this impression of the kindness of the master long after they ceased to
worship at the shrine of the peasant with her scythe posed against the
sunset.

One duty the Boulevards of the Left Bank imposed upon us in the Nineties
was the search for Verlaine and Bibi-la-Puree, and many another poet for
all time and celebrity for the day, in the _cafes_ where they waited to
be found and I do not doubt were deeply disappointed if nobody came to
find them. The fame of these great men, who were easily accessible when
the _cafe_ they went to happened to be known, had crossed to London with
so much else London was labelling _fin-de-siecle_. To have met them, to
be able to speak of them in intimate terms, to be authorities on the
special vice of each, was the ambition of the yearning young decadents
on the British side of the Channel, who imagined in the intimacy a proof
of their own emancipation from it would have been hard to say what,
their own genius for revolution if it was not clear what reason they had
to revolt. We, who cultivated a withering scorn for decadence and the
affectation of it, were moved by nothing more serious or ambitious than
youth's natural desire to see and to know everything that is going on,
and we could not have been very ardent in our search, for I never
remember once, on the nights we devoted to the hunt, tracking these
lions to their lair. However