n, should
be divided into a set of compartments like a dressing-case. I detest
hedges, partitions and walls like a phalansterian.

To keep off dampness I have had the sides of the market-house, as my
mother calls it, wainscoted in oak to the height of twelve or fifteen
feet.

By a kind of gallery with two stairways, I can reach the windows and
enjoy the beauty of the landscape, which is lovely. My bed is a simple
hammock of aloes-fibre, slung in a corner; very low divans, and huge
tapestry arm-chairs, for the rest of the furniture. Hung up on the
wainscoting are pistols, guns, masks, foils, gloves, plastrons,
dumb-bells and other gymnastic equipments. My favorite horse is
installed in the opposite angle, in a box of _bois des iles_, a
precaution that secures him from the brutalizing society of grooms, and
keeps him a horse of the world.

The whole is heated by a cyclopean chimney, which devours a load of wood
at a mouthful, and before which a mastodon might be roasted.

Come, then, dear Roger, I can offer you a friendly ruin, the chapel with
the trefoil quadrilobes.

We will walk together, axe in hand, through my park, which is as dense
and impenetrable as the virgin forests of America, or the jungles of
India. It has not been touched for sixty years, and I have sworn to
break the head of the first gardener who dares to approach it with a
pruning-hook.

It is glorious to see the abandonment of Nature in this extravagance of
vegetation, this wild luxuriance of flowers and foliage; the trees
stretch out their arms, breed and intertwine in the most fantastic
manner; the branches make a hundred curiously-distorted turns, and
interlace in beautiful disorder; sometimes hanging the red berries of
the mountain-ash among the silver foliage of the aspen.

The rapid slope of the ground produces a thousand picturesque accidents;
the grass, brightened by a spring which at a little distance plays a
thousand pranks over the rocks, flourishes in rich luxuriance; the
burdock, with large velvet leaves, the stinging nettles, the hemlock
with greenish umbels; the wild oats--every weed prospers wonderfully. No
stranger approaches the enclosure, whose denizens are two or three
little deer with tawny coats gleaming through the trees.

This eminently romantic spot would harmonize with your melancholy. Mlle.
de Chateaudun not being in Paris, you have better chance of finding her
elsewhere.

Who knows if she has not taken refuge in o