not so quiet as to be dull. Such is my apartment,
I say, but how I got here—why I came
here—why I left a warm and comfortable home
in the metropolis of England, at a time of year
when it was parlous cold, to come to one of the
coldest places in the civilised globe, or the
uncivilised either—also why I came alone and
without letters of introduction, and why I am
lving in the Faubourg Poissonnière instead of
the English quarter of Paris—these are
questions which must and shall be answered—but
not yet.

I would answer them at once, but that I
cannot shake off an inclination to wander for a
moment into Provincial France. 'Tis the fault
of those confounded logs. If I had not written
those few words above, about the fire, I might
have begun giving an account of myself, at once,
but now, for some reason or another, I cannot
for the life of me get away from the logs. What
rude wooden-shoed savages have hewn them
in forest districts far away from here? I have
seen such places, and they are present to my
mind's eye now, as I lean back in my chair and
tax my memory—staring at the logs the while.
I see the oxen waiting for their load. I hear
the tinkling of the little bells that hang in
clusters round their heads. How wild in aspect
and strong in limb the women who help to carry
and to stack the wood. Sturdy the bodice, and
heavy the petticoat that can stand the wear and
tear they have to undergo. I can see the grave
wild stare of these grand and savage matrons.
I can see, in the village near at hand, their
sturdy children just let loose from school—
miniature editions of their mothers—white cap,
stiff bodice, and heavy, swinging skirt. I can
hear the measured clatter of their little sabots,
as they trot in a troop along the rough pavement
of the village street, and, with the smell of
memory, I might doubtless perceive that odour
of burning wood which ever prevails (and it is
well it does) in a French village, were it not
that the perfume of sprats is so strong at this
moment in the house that it leaves no scope
for the imagination as appealed to by the smell.

Of all the gates of sense there is not one—
not one—that gives such ready rapid access to
the storehouses of memory as does this one of
smell. It may be that it is because it is so
rarely made use of in connexion with the higher
functions of the mind that its power is the
greater when it is. The associative part of our
imagination is used to being appealed to by the
hearing and the sight, but it does not expect
such appeals from the smell, and hence, perhaps,
its greater influence. There are few who do not
know what long-forgotten things some scent
such as that of burning weeds or autumn leaves
will bring to mind—few who do not know with
what force they strike the memory when brought
in this way before it.

Alas, how that smell of smouldering weeds
reminds me of the day when I walked with poor
Jack Redford over the breezy uplands of Cumnor
Hurst. How young he was to die. How
little likely it seemed then that he would leave
us all so soon. How changed are all things
since that time. Is it the world that is so
altered—or am I ?

But whither have the logs taken me now ?
First out of my quatrième at Paris into
provincial France, and straight away to the wooded
hills and valleys of one of England's loveliest
counties. Yet, now I think of it, this is not
so much amiss, for the very thing I wanted was
a good pretext for getting back to the British
side of the Channel as a necessary preliminary
to my giving some account of the circumstances
of my sentimental journey—of its origin, its
peculiarities, and some, at least, of its results.

How often have I promised myself this treat
—to lurk off to Paris alone. With nobody to
force me to see things I am not interested in, or
to be perpetually wanting to do the thing which
I detest. Nobody to drag me over extensive
museums and endless palaces with slippery floors.
The truth is that I hate sight-seeing in general,
and palaces with slippery floors in particular,
and infinitely prefer feasting my eyes upon the
snug decorations of the little room down stairs,
in which Mdlle. Zélie spends most of her time
—and the snuggest decoration of which is to be
found in the person of Mdlle. Zélie herself—to
starving them upon glass and marble and bad
pictures in the Palace of the Luxembourg itself.
[The privilege of entering this apartment, of which
I avail myself to talk in a sound Anglican French
to Mdlle. Zélie for half an hour together,
belongs to me as a lodger who has to hang up
his key upon a numbered nail in the wall every
day when he goes out.]

What, back again in Paris already? How
shall I keep upon the English side of the
Channel long enough to describe the peculiar
reasons which caused my sentimental journey to
take place at all?

I went to Paris because I was driven there by
my friends.

This journey, often procrastinated, might
have been put off altogether but for a chain of
circumstances, the first link of which was
forged when the present writer remarked one
day casually to an intimate friend, "I've half a
mind" (I only said "half," remember), "being
rather unsettled about a house just now, to have
a run over to Paris."

Two days after this, meeting in the street
another friend who is also intimately acquainted
with the first, I was greeted by him with these
remarkable words, "So you're going to Paris,
eh?"

Passing through the hands of a friend or two
more, the report that I was going to Paris
turned into a fixed and determined assertion
that I was gone to the French metropolis, and
came latterly to circumstantial accounts of a
lengthened continental tour, of which this was
to be but the preliminary step. So that very
soon, when I stumbled upon an acquaintance,
his first words would be, "Why I thought you
had gone abroad." And this, or " What, not
gone yet?" began latterly to be said by my
friends in rather an injured tone, as if I was an