Close by was a small wooden shed, or _baraque_, prettily painted and glazed, and ornamented at the top with little tricolor flags; it belonged to a couple of old ladies, Mere Manette and Grandmere Manette-the two oldest women ever seen. They were very keen about business, and would not give credit for a centime--not even to English boys. They were said to be immensely rich and quite alone in the world. How very dead they must be now! I thought. And I gazed at them and wondered at their liveliness and the pleasure they took in living. They sold many things: nougat, _pain d'epices_, mirlitons, hoops, drums, noisy battledoors and shuttlecocks; and little ten-sou hand-mirrors, neatly bound in zinc, that could open and shut. I looked at myself in one of these that was hanging outside; I was old and worn and gray-my face badly shaven--my hair almost white. I had never been old in a dream before. I walked through the gate in the fortifications on to the outer Talus (which was quite bare in those days), in the direction of the Mare d'Auteuil. The place seemed very deserted and dull for a Thursday. It was a sad and sober walk; my melancholy was not to be borne--my heart was utterly broken, and my body so tired I could scarcely drag myself along. Never before had I known in a dream what it was to be tired. I gazed at the famous fortifications in all their brand-new pinkness, the scaffoldings barely removed--some of them still lying in the dry ditch between--and smiled to think how these little brick and granite walls would avail to keep the Germans out of Paris thirty years later (twenty years ago). I tried to throw a stone across the narrow part, and found I could no longer throw stones; so I sat down and rested. How thin my legs were! and how miserably clad--in old prison trousers, greasy, stained, and frayed, and ignobly kneed--and what boots! [Illustration: "I sat down and rested."] Never had I been shabby in a dream before. Why could not I, once for all, walk round to the other side and take a header _a la hussarde_ off those lofty bulwarks, and kill myself for good and all? Alas! I should only blur the dream, and perhaps even wake in my miserable strait-waistcoat. And I wanted to see the _mare_ once more, very badly. This set me thinking. I would fill my pockets with stones, and throw myself into the Mare d'Auteuil after I had taken a last good look at it, and around. Perhaps the shock of emotion, in my present state of weakness, might really kill me in my sleep. Who knows? it was worth trying, anyhow. I got up and dragged myself to the _mare_. It was deserted but for one solitary female figure, soberly clad in black and gray, that sat motionless on the bench by the old willow. I walked slowly round in her direction, picking up stones and putting them into my pockets, and saw that she was gray-haired and middle-aged, with very dark eyebrows, and extremely tall, and that her magnificent eyes were following me.