The wisterias tumbled their cataracts
of blue blossoms down the spouts; rare flowers, of minute proportions,
burst from the button-holes of the young horsemen going to the Bois;
the gloves of the American colony became lilac; hyacinths, daffodils
and pansies moved by wagon-loads over the streets and soared to
the windows of the sewing-girls. Overhead, in the steaming and
cloud-marbled blue, stood the April sun. "Apelles of the flowers," as
an old English writer has styled him, he was coloring the garden-beds
with his rarest enamels, and spreading a sheet of varied tints over
the steps of the Madeleine, where they hold the horticultural market.

[Illustration]

This sort of country ecstasy, this season at once stimulating and
enervating, tortured me. It disturbed my bibliophilist labors,
and gave a twang of musty nausea even to the sweet scent of old
binding-leather. I was as a man caught in the pangs of removing,
unattached to either home; and I bent from my windows over the throngs
of festal promenaders, taciturn and uneasy. I fancied that wings were
sprouting from my brown dressing-robe, and that they were the volatile
wings of the moth or dragon-fly. But to establish myself at Marly
before the baron, would not that be a breach of compact? Would he
not make it a _casus belli_? Luckily, we were getting through April:
to-morrow it would be the twenty-eighth.

On that memorable morning the sun rose strong and bright, and
photographed a brilliant idea upon my cerebellum.

I would undertake a pedestrian attack upon Marly by winding my way
around the suburbs of the capital. What more appropriate, for a
profound geographer and tourist, than to measure with my walking-stick
that enormous bed of gypsum, at the centre of which, like a bee in a
sugar-basin, Paris sits and hums?

[Illustration]

The notion gained upon me. Perhaps it was the natural reaction from
the Mountains of the Moon; but in my then state of mind no prospect
could appear more delicious than a long tramp among the quiet scenes
through which the city fringes itself off into rurality. Those suburbs
of blank convent walls! those curves of the Seine and the Marne,
blocked with low villages, whose walls of white, stained with tender
mould and tiled with brown, dipped their placid reflections into the
stream! those droll square boats, pushing out from the sedges to urge
you across the ferry! those long rafts of lumber, following, like
cunning crocodiles, th