ing with
the business of pleasure; and the palace, breathing distinction and
peopled by historic names, stands smokeless among gardens.

Perhaps the last attempt at savage life was that of the harmless humbug
who called himself the hermit. In a great tree, close by the highroad,
he had built himself a little cabin after the manner of the Swiss Family
Robinson; thither he mounted at night, by the romantic aid of a rope
ladder; and if dirt be any proof of sincerity, the man was savage as a
Sioux. I had the pleasure of his acquaintance; he appeared grossly
stupid, not in his perfect wits, and interested in nothing but small
change; for that he had a great avidity. In the course of time he proved
to be a chicken-stealer, and vanished from his perch; and perhaps from
the first he was no true votary of forest freedom, but an ingenious,
theatrically-minded beggar, and his cabin in the tree was only
stock-in-trade to beg withal. The choice of his position would seem to
indicate so much; for if in the forest there are no places still to be
discovered, there are many that have been forgotten, and that lie
unvisited. There, to be sure, are the blue arrows waiting to reconduct
you, now blazed upon a tree, now posted in the corner of a rock. But
your security from interruption is complete; you might camp for weeks,
if there were only water, and not a soul suspect your presence; and if I
may suppose the reader to have committed some great crime and come to me
for aid, I think I could still find my way to a small cavern, fitted
with a hearth and chimney, where he might lie perfectly concealed. A
confederate landscape-painter might daily supply him with food; for
water, he would have to make a nightly tramp as far as to the nearest
pond; and at last, when the hue and cry began to blow over, he might get
gently on the train at some side station, work round by a series of
junctions, and be quietly captured at the frontier.

Thus Fontainebleau, although it is truly but a pleasure-ground, and
although, in favourable weather, and in the more celebrated quarters, it
literally buzzes with the tourist, yet has some of the immunities and
offers some of the repose of natural forests. And the solitary, although
he must return at night to his frequented inn, may yet pass the day with
his own thoughts in the companionable silence of the trees. The demands
of the imagination vary; some can be alone in a back garden looked upon
by windows; others, l