without its concomitants--a shelter
and something to sit on.

The plain became wearisome. There are two things the American-born,
however long a resident abroad, never forgives the lack of in
Europe. The first I miss when I am in Paris: it is the perpetual
street-mending of an American town. Here the boulevards, smeared with
asphaltum or bedded with crunched macadam, attain smoothness without
life: you travel on scum. But in the dear old American streets the
epidermis is vital: what strength and mutual reliance in the cobbles
as they stand together in serried ranks, like so many eye-teeth! How
they are perpetually sinking into prodigious ruts, along which the
ponderous drays are forced to dance on one wheel in a paroxysm
of agony and critical equipoise! But the perpetual state of
street-mending, that is the crowning interest. What would I not
sometimes give to exchange the Swiss sweeping-girls, plying their long
brooms desolately in the mud, for the paviors' hammers of America,
which play upon the pebbles like a carillon of muffled bells? As
for the other lack, it is the want of wooden bridges. Far away in my
native meadows gleams the silver Charles: the tramp of horses' hoofs
comes to my ear from the timbers of the bridge. _Here_, with a pelt
and a scramble your bridge is crossed: nothing addresses the heart
from its stony causeway. But the low, arched tubes of wood that span
the streams of my native land are so many bass-viols, sending out
mellow thunders with every passing wagon to blend with the rustling
stream and the sighing woods. Shall I never hear them again?

A reminiscence more than ten years old came to give precision to my
ramblings in the past. Beyond the rustic pathway I was now following I
could perceive the hills of Trou-Vassou. Hereabouts, if memory served
me, I might find a welcome, almost a home, and the clasp of cordial if
humble hands. Here I might find folks who would laugh when I arrived,
and would be glad to share their luncheon with me But--ten years gone
by!

[Illustration: THE TWO CHICKENS.]

This computation chilled my hopes. What family remains ten years in a
spot--above all, a spot on that fluctuating periphery of Paris, where
the mighty capital, year after year, bursts belt after belt? Where
might they have gone? Francine!--Francine must be twenty-two. Married,
of course. Her husband, no doubt, has dragged her off to some
other department. Her parents have followed. March, volunteer,