y the stars are shining as I pass down the gangway,
hat-box in hand. They twinkle brightly over the deck I am now
pacing--amused, may be, at my excitement. The machinery grunts and
creaks. The little boat quakes in the excruciating throes of its
departure. At last!... One by one, the stars take their last look at
me, and the sky grows pale, and the sea blanches mysteriously with it.
Through the delicate cold air of the dawn, across the grey waves of the
sea, the outlines of Dieppe grow and grow. The quay is lined with its
blue-bloused throng. These porters are as excited by us as though they
were the aborigines of some unknown island. (And yet, are they not
here, at this hour, in these circumstances, every day of their lives?)
These gestures! These voices, hoarse with passion! The dear music of
French, rippling up clear for me through all this hoarse confusion of
its utterance, and making me happy!... I drink my cup of steaming
coffee--true coffee!--and devour more than one roll. At the tables
around me, pale and dishevelled from the night, sit the people whom I
saw--years ago!--at Charing Cross. How they have changed! The coffee
sends a glow throughout my body. I am fulfilled with a sense of
material well-being. The queer ethereal exaltation of the dawn has
vanished. I climb up into the train, and dispose myself in the
dun-cushioned coupe'. 'Chemins de Fer de l'Ouest' is perforated on the
white antimacassars. Familiar and strange inscription! I murmur its
impressive iambs over and over again. They become the refrain to which
the train vibrates on its way. I smoke cigarettes, a little drowsily
gazing out of the window at the undulating French scenery that flies
past me, at the silver poplars. Row after slanted row of these
incomparably gracious trees flies past me, their foliage shimmering in
the unawoken landscape Soon I shall be rattling over the cobbles of
unawoken Paris, through the wide white-grey streets with their unopened
jalousies. And when, later, I awake in the unnatural little bedroom of
walnut-wood and crimson velvet, in the bed whose curtains are white
with that whiteness which Paris alone can give to linen, a Parisian sun
will be glittering for me in a Parisian sky.

Yes! In my whole collection the Paris specimens were dearest to me,
meant most to me, I think. But there was none that had not some
tendrils on sentiment. All of them I prized, more or less. Of the
Aberdeen specimens I was immensely fond. Who