Fortune smiled on me; why, I don't know; perhaps because I was small and sandy haired and harmless, and did not worry her. I sold two or three pictures, I obtained regular employment on an illustrated journal, and raised my price for contributions to _Le Fou Rire_. Bread and butter were assured. There was never prouder youth than I, when one August morning I started from Paris for Chartres, with fifty superfluous pounds in my pocket which I determined to restore to Paragot. The old Paragot of the high roads, hairy and bronzed, and wearing a great straw hat with wide brim turned down, met me at the little local station. He forgot that he was half British and almost hugged me. At last I had come--it was my third visit--at last I had torn myself away from that _sacré_ Paris and its flesh-pots and its paint-pots and its artificialities. "Nothing is real in Paris, whether it be the smile on the painted lady's lips or the dream of the young poet. Here, in the midst of God's fields, there is no pretending, no shamming, no lying, none of your confounded idealism. All is solid, _mon gars_. Solid like that," and he thumped his chest to illustrate the argument. "Bucéphale, too?" I queried with a laugh, as we fetched up beside the most ancient horse in the Department, drooping between the shafts of a springless cart. Needless to say, Bucéphale had been rechristened in his extreme old age. "He is a living proof," cried Paragot, "of the solidity _rerum agrestium_. Look at him! Shew me a horse of his age in Paris. The Paris horses, like Youth in the poem, grow pale and spectre thin and die of premature decay. Here, _mon petit_," said he giving a sou to a blue bloused urchin who was restraining the impetuous Bucéphale from a wild gallop over the Eure et Loire, "when you have spent that come to La Haye and I will give you another." He threw my bag into the cart, and we took our places on the plank that served as a seat. "_En route_, Bucéphale!" cried Paragot, gathering up the reins. "Observe the kindly manners of the country. If I had addressed him like your Paris cabman with a '_Hue Cocotte!_' it would have wounded his susceptibilities." Bucéphale started off jog-trot down the straight white road edged with poplars, while Paragot talked, and the sun blazed down upon us from a cobalt sky. All around the fertile plain laughed in the sunshine--a giant, contented laugh, like that of its broad-faced, broad-hipped daughters who greeted Paragot as we raced by at the rate of five miles an hour. Did I ever meet a Paris horse that went this speed? asked Paragot, and I answered him truthfully, "Never." We stopped in a white-walled, red-roofed village, beside a tiny shop gloriously adorned with a gilt bull's head. The butcher's wife came out. "_Bonjour_, Monsieur Paragot." "_Bonjour_, Madame Jolivet, have you a nice fatted calf for this young Prodigal from Paris? If you haven't, we can do with four kilos of good beef."