As we grew older and wiser we had permission to extend our explorations to Meudon, Versailles, St. Germain, and other delightful places; to ride thither on hired horses, after having duly learned to ride at the famous "School of Equitation," in the Rue Duphot. [Illustration: "OMINOUS BIRDS OF YORE."] Also, we swam in those delightful summer baths in the Seine, that are so majestically called "Schools of Natation," and became past masters in "la coupe" (a stroke no other Englishman but ourselves has ever been quite able to manage), and in all the different delicate "nuances" of header-taking--"la coulante," "la hussarde," "la tete-beche," "la tout ce que vous voudrez." Also, we made ourselves at home in Paris, especially old Paris. For instance, there was the island of St. Louis, with its stately old mansions _entre cour et jardin,_ behind grim stone portals and high walls where great magistrates and lawyers dwelt in dignified seclusion--the nobles of the rove: but where once had dwelt, in days gone by, the greater nobles of the sword-crusaders, perhaps, and knights templars, like Brian de Bois Guilbert. And that other more famous island, la Cite, where Paris itself was born, where Notre Dame reared its twin towers above the melancholy, gray, leprous walls and dirty brown roofs of the Hotel-Dieu. Pathetic little tumble down old houses, all out of drawing and perspective, nestled like old spiders' webs between the buttresses of the great cathedral and on two sides of the little square in front (the Place du Parvis Notre Dame) stood ancient stone dwellings, with high slate roofs and elaborately wrought iron balconies. They seemed to have such romantic histories that I never tired of gazing at them, and wondering what the histories could be; and now I think of it, one of these very dwellings must have been the Hotel de Gondelaurier, where, according to the most veracious historian that ever was, poor Esmeralda once danced and played the tambourine to divert the fair damsel Fleur-de-Lys de Gondelaurier and her noble friends, all of whom she so transcended in beauty, purity, goodness, and breeding (although she was but an untaught, wandering gypsy girl, out of the gutter); and there, before them all and the gay archer, she was betrayed to her final undoing by her goat, whom she had so imprudently taught how to spell the beloved name of "Phebus." Close by was the Morgue, that grewsome building which the great etcher Meryon has managed to invest with some weird fascination akin to that it had for me in those days--and has now, as I see it with the charmed eyes of Memory. La Morgue! what a fatal twang there is about the very name! [Illustration: SETTLING AN OLD SCORE.]