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.
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