It amuses me to think by day, when broad awake in my sad English prison, and among my crazy peers, how this nightly umbrageous French solitude of mine, so many miles and years away, is now but a common, bare, wide grassy plain, overlooked by a gaudy, beflagged grand-stand. It is Sunday, let us say--and for all I know a great race may be going on--all Paris is there, rich and poor. Little red-legged soldiers, big blue-legged gendarmes, keep the course clear; the sun shines, the tricolour waves, the gay, familiar language makes the summer breeze musical. I dare say it is all very bright and animated, but the whole place rings with the vulgar din of the bookmakers, and the air is full of dust and foul with the scent of rank tobacco, the reek of struggling French humanity; and the gaunt Eiffel Tower looks down upon it all from the sky over Paris (so, at least, I am told) like a skeleton at a feast. Then twilight comes, and the crowds have departed; on foot, on horseback, on bicycles and tricycles, in every kind of vehicle; many by the _chemin de fer de ceinture_, the Auteuil station of which is close by ... all is quiet and bare and dull. Then down drops the silent night like a curtain, and beneath its friendly cover the strange transformation effects itself quickly, and all is made ready for _me_. The grand-stand evaporates, the railway station melts away into thin air; there is no more Eiffel Tower with its electric light! The sweet forest of fifty years ago rises suddenly out of the ground, and all the wild live things that once lived in it wake to their merry life again. A quiet deep old pond in a past French forest, hallowed by such memories! What _can_ be more enchanting? Oh, soft and sweet nostalgia, so soon to be relieved! Up springs the mellow sun, the light of other days, to its appointed place in the heavens--zenith, or east or west, according to order. A light wind blows from the south--everything is properly disinfected, and made warm and bright and comfortable--and lo! old Peter Ibbetson appears upon the scene, absolute monarch of all he surveys for the next eight hours--one whose right there are literally none to dispute. I do not encourage noisy gatherings there as a rule, nor by the pond; I like to keep the sweet place pretty much to myself; there is no selfishness in this, for I am really depriving nobody. Whoever comes there now, comes there nearly fifty years ago and does not know it; they must have all died long since. Sometimes it is a _garde champetre_ in Louis Philippe's blue and silver, with his black pipe, his gaiters, his old flint gun, and his embroidered game-bag. He does well in the landscape. Sometimes it is a pair of lovers, if they are good-looking and well-behaved, or else the boys from Saindou's school to play fly the garter--_la raie_.