, taking much time and ingenuity to load, needing at the
least three, usually four--horses, and on Alpine passes six, not only
jolted and lagged painfully on bad roads, but was liable in every way to
more awkward discomfitures than lighter vehicles; getting itself jammed in
archways, wrenched with damage out of ruts, and involved in volleys of
justifiable reprobation among market stalls. So when we knew better, my
father and mother always had their own old-fashioned light two-horse
carriage to themselves, and I had one made with any quantity of front and
side pockets for books and picked up stones; and hung very low, with a
fixed side-step, which I could get off or on with the horses at the trot;
and at any rise or fall of the road, relieve them, and get my own walk,
without troubling the driver to think of me.

7. Thus, leaving Paris in the bright spring morning, when the Seine
glittered gaily at Charenton, and the arbres de Judee were mere pyramids of
purple bloom round Villeneuve-St.-Georges, one had an afternoon walk among
the rocks of Fontainebleau, and next day we got early into Sens, for new
lessons in its cathedral aisles, and the first saunter among the budding
vines of the coteaux. I finished my plate of the Tower of Giotto, for the
'Seven Lamps,' in the old inn at Sens, which Dickens has described in his
wholly matchless way in the last chapter of 'Mrs. Lirriper's Lodgings'. The
next day brought us to the oolite limestones at Mont Bard, and we always
spent the Sunday at the Bell in Dijon. Monday, the drive of drives, through
the village of Genlis, the fortress of Auxonne, and up the hill to the
vine-surrounded town of Dole; whence, behold at last the limitless ranges
of Jura, south and north, beyond the woody plain, and above them the
'Derniers Kochers' and the white square-set summit, worshipped ever anew.
Then at Poligny, the same afternoon, we gathered the first milkwort for
that year; and on Tuesday, at St. Laurent, the wild lily of the valley; and
on Wednesday, at Morez, gentians.

And on Thursday, the _eighth or ninth_ day from Paris, days all spent
patiently and well, one saw from the gained height of Jura, the great Alps
unfold themselves in their chains and wreaths of incredible crest and
cloud.

8. Unhappily, during all the earliest and usefullest years of such
travelling, I had no thought of ever taking up botany as a study; feeling
well that even geology, which was antecedent to painting with me,