letons, beat the floor. The street was a bower of
lilacs, and opposite the Ile d'Amour was the village church.

Then the workmen of the Paris suburbs were invaders: they besieged the
village on Sundays in daring swarms, to be beaten back successfully by
the duties of every successive Monday. Now they are fixed there. They
are the colorless inhabitants of these many-storied houses. The town's
long holiday is over. Where the odorous avenues of lilacs stretched
along, affording bouquets for maman and the children and toothpicks
for ferocious young warriors from the garrisons, are odious lengths
of wall. Everything is changed, and from the gardens the grisettes of
Alfred de Musset are with sighing sent. Their haunts are laboratories
now, and the Ile d'Amour is a mayor's office.

I, to whom the beer-scandals of the Rhine and the students' holidays
of the Seine were among the Childe-Harold enormities of a not
over-sinful youth, was sadly disappointed. Thinking of the groves of
an Eden, I ran against the furnaces of a Pandemonium. For a stroll
back toward my adolescence, Belleville was a bad beginning. I
determined to console myself with the green meadows of Saint-Gervais
and the pretty woods of Romainville. Attaining the latter was half
an hour's affair among long walls and melancholy houses: at
Saint-Gervais, a double file of walls and houses--at Romainville,
houses and walls again. In the latter, where formerly there were
scarcely three watches distributed amongst the whole village, I was
incensed to find the shop of a clockmaker: it was somewhat consoling,
though, to find it a clockmaker's of the most pronounced suburban
kind, with pairs of wooden shoes amongst the guard-chains in the
window, and pots of golden mustard ranged alternately with the
antiquated silver turnips.

Before the church I found yet standing a knotty little elder tree, a
bewitched-looking vegetable. A beadle in a blouse, engaged in washing
one of the large altar-candles with soap and water at the public pump,
gave me the following history of the elder tree. I am passionately
fond of legends, and this is one quite hot and fresh, only a hundred
years old. Hear the tale of the elder of Romainville.

The excellent cure of Romainville in the last century was a man of
such a charitable nature that his all was in the hands of the
poor. The grocer of the village, a potentate of terrific powers and
inexorable temper, finally refused to trust him with the su