with his
boat, and Leah inside it--her anxious eyes on the stretch to count
those curly heads again and again. She was a good mathematician, and
the tale always came right in the end; and home was reached at last,
and no one a bit the worse for a good long swim in those well-aired,
sunlit waves.

Once we went on the top of the diligence to Etretat for the day, and
there we talked of poor Bonzig and his first and last dip in the
sea; and did "la coupe" in the waters that had been so fatal to him,
poor fellow!

Then we went by the steamer _Jean Bart_ to Trouville and Deauville,
and up the Seine in a steam-launch to Rouen.

In the afternoons and evenings we took long country walks and caught
moths, or went to Havre by tramway and cleared out all the
pastry-cooks in the Rue de Paris, and watched the transatlantic
steamers, out or home, from that gay pier which so happily combines
business with pleasure--utile dulci, as Pere Brossard would have
said--and walked home by the charming Cote d'Ingouville, sacred to
the memory of Modeste Mignon.

And then, a little later on, I was a good Uncle Bob, and took the
whole party to Auteuil, near Paris, and hired two lordly mansions
next door to each other in the Villa Montmorency, and turned their
gardens into one.

Altogether, with the Scatcherds and ourselves, eight children,
governesses, nurses, and other servants, and dogs and the smaller
animals, we were a very large party, and a very lively one. I like
this sort of thing better than anything else in the world.

I hired carriages and horses galore, and for six weeks we made
ourselves thoroughly comfortable and at home in Paris and around.

That was the happiest holiday I ever had since the vacation Barty
and I spent at the Lafertes' in the Gue des Aulnes when we were
school-boys.

And such was our love for the sport he called "_la chasse aux
souvenirs_" that one day we actually went there, travelling by train
to La Tremblaye, where we spent the night.

It was a sad disenchantment!

The old Lafertes were dead, the young ones had left that part of the
country; and the house and what remained of the gardens now belonged
to another family, and had become formal and mean and business-like
in aspect, and much reduced in size.

Much of the outskirts of the forest had been cleared and was being
cleared still, and cheap little houses run up for workmen; an
immense and evil-smelling factory with a tall chimney had replaced