'Twas at night I saw most of the city, for only in the darkness did I dare to venture out of the Hôtel Dieu. Daundering my lone along the cobbles, I took a pleasure in the exercise of tenanting these towering lands with people having histories little different from the histories of the folks far off in my Scottish home--their daughters marrying, their sons going throughither (as we say), their bairns wakening and crying in their naked beds, and grannies sitting by the ingle-neuk cheerfully cracking upon ancient days. Many a time in the by-going I looked up their pend closes seeking the eternal lovers of our own burgh towns and never finding them, for I take it that in love the foreign character is coyer than our own. But no matter how eagerly I went forth upon my nightly airing in a _roquelaure_ borrowed from Father Hamilton's friend, the adventure always ended, for me, in a sort of eerie terror of those close-hemming walls, those tangled lanes where slouched the outcast and the ne'er-do-weel, and not even the glitter of the moon upon the river between its laden isles would comfort me. “La! la! la!” would Father Hamilton cry at me when I got home with a face like a fiddle. “Art the most ridiculous rustic ever ate a cabbage or set foot in Arcady. Why, man! the woman must be wooed--this Mademoiselle Lutetia. Must take her front and rear, walk round her, ogling bravely. Call her dull! call her dreadful! _Ciel!_ Has the child never an eye in his mutton head? I avow she is the queen of the earth this Paris. If I were young and wealthy I'd buy the glittering stars in constellations and turn them into necklets for her. With thy plaguey gift of the sonnet I'd deave her with ecstasies and spill oceans of ink upon leagues of paper to tell her about her eyes. Go to! Scotland, go to! Ghosts! ghosts! devil the thing else but ghosts in thy rustic skull, for to take a fear of Lutetia when her black hair is down of an evening and thou canst not get a glimpse of that beautiful neck that is rounded like the same in the Psyche of Praxiteles. Could I pare off a portion of this rotundity and go out in a masque as Apollo I'd show thee things.” And all he saw of Paris himself was from the windows of the hospital, where he and I would stand by the hour looking out into the square. For the air itself he had to take it in a little garden at the back, surrounded by a high wall, and affording a seclusion that even the priest could avail himself of without the hazard of discovery. He used to sit in an arbour there in the warmth of the day, and it was there I saw another trait of his character that helped me much to forget his shortcomings.