escort Little Billee to _his_ door, in the
Place de l'Odeon, and he would re-escort them both back again, and so
on till any hour you please.

Or again, if it rained, and Paris through the studio window loomed
lead-colored, with its shiny slate roofs under skies that were ashen
and sober, and the wild west wind made woeful music among the
chimney-pots, and little gray waves ran up the river the wrong way,
and the Morgue looked chill and dark and wet, and almost uninviting
(even to three healthy-minded young Britons), they would resolve to
dine and spend a happy evening at home.

Little Billee, taking with him three francs (or even four), would dive
into back streets and buy a yard or so of crusty new bread, well
burned on the flat side, a fillet of beef, a litre of wine, potatoes
and onions, butter, a little cylindrical cheese called "bondon de
Neufchatel," tender curly lettuce, with chervil, parsley, spring
onions, and other fine herbs, and a pod of garlic, which would be
rubbed on a crust of bread to flavor things with.

Taffy would lay the cloth English-wise, and also make the salad, for
which, like everybody else I ever met, he had a special receipt of his
own (putting in the oil first and the vinegar after); and indeed, his
salads were quite as good as everybody else's.

The Laird, bending over the stove, would cook the onions and beef into
a savory Scotch mess so cunningly that you could not taste the beef
for the onions--nor always the onions for the garlic!

And they would dine far better than at le Pere Trin's, far better than
at the English Restaurant in the Rue de la Madeleine--better than
anywhere else on earth!

And after dinner, what coffee, roasted and ground on the spot, what
pipes and cigarettes of "caporal," by the light of the three shaded
lamps, while the rain beat against the big north window, and the wind
went howling round the quaint old medieval tower at the corner of the
Rue Vieille des Mauvais Ladres (the old street of the bad lepers),
and the damp logs hissed and crackled in the stove!

What jolly talk into the small hours! Thackeray and Dickens again, and
Tennyson and Byron (who was "not dead yet" in those days); and Titian
and Velasquez, and young Millais and Holman Hunt (just out); and
Monsieur Ingres and Monsieur Delacroix, and Balzac and Stendhal and
George Sand; and the good Dumas! and Edgar Allan Poe; and the glory
that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome....

Good, hone