e moment
overstep the modesty of nature. He was quite aware that if he were to
see it again he should perhaps have a drop or a shock, and he never
found himself wishing that the wheel of time would turn it up again,
just as he had seen it in the maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine
of Tremont Street. It would be a different thing, however, to see the
remembered mixture resolved back into its elements--to assist at the
restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour: the dusty day in
Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the maroon-coloured
sanctum, the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the poplars,
the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.

He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that it
should stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue; he threw
himself on the general amiability of the day for the hint of where to
alight. His theory of his excursion was that he could alight
anywhere--not nearer Paris than an hour's run--on catching a suggestion
of the particular note required. It made its sign, the
suggestion--weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring--at
the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the right
spot, and he found himself getting out as securely as if to keep an
appointment. It will be felt of him that he could amuse himself, at
his age, with very small things if it be again noted that his
appointment was only with a superseded Boston fashion. He hadn't gone
far without the quick confidence that it would be quite sufficiently
kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the poplars
and willows, the reeds and river--a river of which he didn't know, and
didn't want to know, the name--fell into a composition, full of
felicity, within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish;
the village on the left was white and the church on the right was grey;
it was all there, in short--it was what he wanted: it was Tremont
Street, it was France, it was Lambinet. Moreover he was freely walking
about in it. He did this last, for an hour, to his heart's content,
making for the shady woody horizon and boring so deep into his
impression and his idleness that he might fairly have got through them
again and reached the maroon-coloured wall. It was a wonder, no doubt,
that the taste of idleness for him shouldn't need more time to sweeten;
but it had in fact taken the few