one direction
more than another, why we went to one place rather than to another,
neither he nor I could tell. I never questioned. Sometimes we wandered
for days on foot, sleeping in village inns or farm-houses--occasionally
under a hedge when the nights were warm. Sometimes we spent two or three
days in an old world town, and Paragot would show me cathedrals and
churches and lecture me on the history of the place, and set me to
sketch bits of the picturesque that took his fancy. In the cool,
exquisite cloister of the Chateau of Jacques Coeur at Bourges I
learned more of the history of Charles VII than any English boy of my
generation. In the Chateau of Blois, the salamanders of Francois
Premier, the statue of Diane de Poictiers, the poison cabinet of
Catherine de Medici, the dungeons of the Cardinal de Lorraine, became
living testimonies of the past under Paragot's imaginative teaching. He
had set his heart on educating me; suddenly as the original impulse had
seized him, yet it lasted strong and became the object of his disordered
and otherwise aimless life. Books we always had in plenty. Tattered
classics are cheap enough in France, and what mattered it if pages were
missing? When done with we threw them away. We might have been tracked
through the country, like the hares in a paper chase, by the trail of
literature we left behind us.

In spite of his unmethodical temperament Paragot made one fixed rule for
my habits. In towns and larger villages, I went to bed at nine o'clock.
What he did with himself by way of amusement in the evenings I never
knew. Nor did it occur to me to conjecture. Healthily tired after a
happy day I was only too glad to crawl to whatever queer resting place
chance provided, and to sleep the sound sleep of boyhood. To be for ever
moving amid a fairyland of novelty, to have no care for the morrow, to
have no tasks save those that were a delight, to be under the protecting
guidance of a godlike being whose very reproofs were couched in terms of
humorous kindness, to eat strange unexpected things, to fraternise in a
new tongue, which daily grew more familiar, with any urchin on the
high-road or city byway, to pass wondering days among country sights
and country sounds--to be in short the perfect vagabond, could boy dream
of a more glorious life?

Now and again a whimsy seized my master and he declared that we must
work and earn our daily bread by the sweat of our brows. At a farm near
Chartres