Opposite to us was a boys' school--"Maison d'Education, Dirigee par M. Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Maitre es Lettres et es Sciences," and author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It cost me many a nightmare. From our windows we could see and hear the boys at play--at a proper distance French boys sound just like English ones, though they do not look so, on account of their blue blouses and dusky, cropped heads--and we could see the gymnastic fixtures in the play-ground, M. Saindou's pride. "Le portique! la poutre! le cheval! et les barres paralleles!" Thus they were described in M. Saindou's prospectus. On either side of the street (which was called "the Street of the Pump"), as far as eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-houses just like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtopped with the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and here and there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gave ingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite, many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery. Looking east one could see in the near distance unsophisticated shops with old-fashioned windows of many panes--Liard, the grocer; Corbin, the poulterer; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker. And this delightful street, as it went on its winding way, led not to Bedford Square or the new University College Hospital, but to Paris through the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and to the river Seine at the other; or else, turning to the right, to St. Cloud through the Bois de Boulogne of Louis Philippe Premier, Roi des Francais--as different from the Paris and the Bois de Boulogne of to-day as a diligence from an express train. On one side of the beautiful garden was another beautiful garden, separated from ours by a high wall covered with peach and pear and plum and apricot trees; on the other, accessible to us through a small door in another lower wall clothed with jasmine, clematis, convolvulus, and nasturtium, was a long, straight avenue of almond-trees, acacia, laburnum, lilac, and may, so closely planted that the ivy-grown walls on either side could scarcely be seen. What lovely patches they made on the ground when the sun shone! One end of this abutted on "the Street of the Pump," from which it was fenced by tall, elaborately-carved iron gates between stone portals, and at the side was a "porte batarde," guarded by le Pere et la Mere Francois, the old concierge and his old wife. Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!