But I still waited on at the gate. The whole scene, but just enacted, had put me back many, many years, to a night long ago in very early childhood; when the torches and tar-barrels of a certain fifth of November celebration at St. Leonards, had flashed as startlingly, as brilliantly, an arrestingly on the panes of our sitting-room; and I, a little child playing quietly by myself on the floor, had been roused suddenly to instant attention by the glare and fantastic dancing reflections on the wall as the procession of shouting torch bearers came striding up the street to the stirring sound of the bugle. The whole incident had made an ineffaceable impression on my mind, and I had often recalled to myself the dark window, the sudden flickering glare, the roar of the flaming tar-barrels, the whole scene swaying ruddily up the street outside, the excited sense of something strange and new happening; but never till this evening, had I been taken right back, and my feet, as it were, planted once again on the same spot of the old sensation, from which the push of so many passing years had displaced the "me" of those days when the spring of life's year was but just beginning. In the Rue des Ours there is a little humble restaurant to which I went again and again. It stands in a narrow, cobbled street, with old black timbered houses opposite it and beside it. It is itself of no mean age. Most of the more well-to-do restaurants in Rouen have indeed _cartes_ fixed up in prominent places outside, but they are _cartes_ without the horse of "_Prix fixe_" harnessed to them. But if you once know your restaurant, then the thing to do is, in this case not to "find out men's wants and meet them there," but to "find out" what particular dish it is really good at cooking and "meet it there" by coming regularly for that very dish, not venturing out into the unknown, and often greasy, waters of a stew, a _hors d'œuvre_, or _entremet_. This is knowledge acquired by experience, for I have, in the craving that sometimes beseiges one for variety, gone much farther and--fared much worse, so now I am content to stay where I fare fairly well, if plainly, at moderate expenditure. One can pass a very happy hour at the little restaurant in the Rue des Ours; they can fry kippers to a turn, and one or two other simple things. Some people I know wouldn't care to come in and have kippers for _second déjeuner_: all I can say is, then they can stay out--go somewhere else and make greater demands on their trouser pockets.