Its appearance is the same to-day as it was in the seventeenth century, but it is now inhabited by the small tradespeople of the Quarter; the last great person who lived there was Victor Hugo; his house has been converted into a museum, and it is there that the most interesting relics of the great poet are stored. I unburdened my mind to Mildred, and my enthusiasm enkindled in her an interest sufficient to induce her to go there with me, for I could not forgo a companion that day, though she was far from being the ideal companion for such sentimental prowling as mine. Afterwards we visited Notre Dame together, and the quays, and the old streets; but Mildred lacked the historical sense, I am afraid, for as we returned in the glow of the sunset, when the monumented Seine is most beautiful, she said that Paris wasn't bad for an old city, and it was the memory of this somewhat crude remark that caused a smile to light up my lips as I looked down the dark green alley through which the April sunlight flickered. But I did not think long of her; my attention was distracted by the beauty of a line of masonry striking across the pale spring sky, tender as a faded eighteenth-century silk, only the blue was a young blue like that of a newly opened flower; and it seemed to me that I could detect in the clouds going by, great designs for groups and single figures, and I compared this aerial sculpture with the sculpture on the roofs. In every angle of the palace there are statues, and in every corner of the gardens one finds groups or single figures. Ancient Rome had sixty thousand statues--a statue for every thirty-three or thirty-four inhabitants; in Paris the proportion of statues to the people is not so great, still there are a great many; no city has had so many since antiquity; and that is why Paris always reminds me of those great days of Greece and Rome when this world was the only world. When one tires of watching the sunlight there is no greater delight than to become absorbed in the beauty of the balustrades, the stately flights of steps, the long avenues of clipped limes, the shapely stone basins, every one monumented in some special way. "How shapely these gardens are," I said, and I fell to dreaming of many rocky hills where, at the entrance of cool caves, a Neptune lies, a vase in his arms with water flowing from it. Yesterevening I walked in these gardens with a sculptor; together we pondered Carpeau's fountain, and, after admiring Frémiet's horses, we went to Watteau's statue, appropriately placed in a dell, among greenswards like those he loved to paint. At this moment my meditation was broken. "I thought I should find you in the museum painting, but here you are, idling in this pretty alley, and in the evening you'll tell us you've been working all day."