Well I knew and loved it all; and most of all I loved it when the sun was setting at my back, and innumerable distant windows reflected the blood-red western flame. It seemed as though half Paris were on fire, with the cold blue east for a background. Dear Paris! Yes, it is something to have roamed over it as a small boy--a small English boy (that is, a small boy unattended by his mother or his nurse), curious, inquisitive, and indefatigable; full of imagination; all his senses keen with the keenness that belongs to the morning of life: the sight of a hawk, the hearing of a bat, almost the scent of a hound. Indeed, it required a nose both subtle and unprejudiced to understand and appreciate and thoroughly enjoy that Paris--not the Paris of M. le Baron Haussmann, lighted by gas and electricity, and flushed and drained by modern science; but the "good old Paris" of Balzac and Eugene Sue and _Les Mysteres_--the Paris of dim oil-lanterns suspended from iron gibbets (where once aristocrats had been hung); of water-carriers who sold water from their hand-carts, and delivered it at your door (_au cinqueme_) for a penny a pail--to drink of, and wash in, and cook with, and all. There were whole streets--and these by no means the least fascinating and romantic--where the unwritten domestic records of every house were afloat in the air outside it--records not all savory or sweet, but always full of interest and charm! One knew at a sniff as one passed the _porte cochere_ what kind of people lived behind and above; what they ate and what they drank, and what their trade was; whether they did their washing at home, and burned tallow or wax, and mixed chicory with their coffee, and were over-fond of Gruyere cheese--the biggest, cheapest, plainest, and most formidable cheese in the world; whether they fried with oil or butter, and liked their omelets overdone and garlic in their salad, and sipped black-currant brandy or anisette as a liqueur; and were overrun with mice, and used cats or mouse-traps to get rid of them, or neither; and bought violets, or pinks, or gillyflowers in season, and kept them too long; and fasted on Friday with red or white beans, or lentils, or had a dispensation from the Pope--or, haply, even dispensed with the Pope's dispensation. For of such a telltale kind were the overtones in that complex, odorous clang. I will not define its fundamental note--ever there, ever the same; big with a warning of quick-coming woe to many households; whose unheeded waves, slow but sure, and ominous as those that rolled on great occasions from le Bourdon de Notre Dame (the Big Ben of Paris), drove all over the gay city and beyond, night and day--penetrating every corner, overflowing the most secret recesses, drowning the very incense by the altar-steps. "_Le pauvre en sa cabane ou le chaume le couvre Est sujet a ses lois; Et la garde qui veille aux barrieres du Louvre N'en defend point nos rois_."