A handsome young blue-coated, silver-buttoned courier of the name of Lami came trotting along from St. Cloud on a roan horse, with a great jingling of his horse's bells and clacking of his short-handled whip. He stopped at the restaurant and called for a glass of white wine, and rising in his stirrups, shouted gayly for Monsieur et Madame Grigoux. They appeared at the first-floor window, looking very happy, and he drank their health, and they his. I could see Gogo and Mimsey in the crowd behind them, and mildly wondered again, as I had so often wondered before, how I came to see it all from the outside--from another point of view than Gogo's. Then the courier bowed gallantly, and said, _"Bonne chance!"_ and went trotting down the Grande Rue on his way to the Tuileries, and the wedding guests began to sing: they sang a song beginning-- _"Il etait un petit navire, Qui n'avait jamais navigue_...." I had quite forgotten it, and listened till the end, and thought it very pretty; and was interested in a dull, mechanical way at discovering that it must be the original of Thackeray's famous ballad of "Little Billee," which I did not hear till many years after. When they came to the last verse-- "_Si cette histoire vous embete, Nous allons la recommencer_," I went on my way. This was my last walk in dreamland, perhaps, and dream-hours are uncertain, and I would make the most of them, and look about me. I walked towards Ranelagh, a kind of casino, where they used to give balls and theatrical performances on Sunday and Thursday nights (and where afterwards Rossini spent the latter years of his life; then it was pulled down, I am told, to make room for many smart little villas). In the meadow opposite M. Erard's park, Saindou's school-boys were playing rounders--_la balle au camp_--from which I concluded it was a Thursday afternoon, a half-holiday; if they had had clean shirts on (which they had not) it would have been Sunday, and the holiday a whole one. I knew them all, and the two _pions_, or ushers, M. Lartigue and _le petit Cazal_; but no longer cared for them or found them amusing or interesting in the least. Opposite the Ranelagh a few old hackney-coach men were pacifically killing time by a game of _bouchon_--knocking sous off a cork with other sous--great fat sous and double sous long gone out of fashion. It is a very good game, and I watched it for a while and envied the long-dead players.