[Illustration: GREEN AND GOLD]
Alas! his coat was no longer the innocent, unsophisticated blue and
silver livery of the bourgeois king, but the hateful green and gold of
another regime.
Farther on the Mare d'Auteuil itself had suffered change and become
respectable--imperially respectable. No more frogs or newts or
water-beetles, I felt sure; but gold and silver fish in vulgar
Napoleonic profusion.
No words that I can find would give any idea of the sadness and longing
that filled me as I trod once more that sunlit grassy brink--the goal of
my fond ambition for twelve long years.
It was Sunday, and many people were about--many children, in their best
Sunday clothes and on their best behavior, discreetly throwing crumbs to
the fish. A new generation, much quieter and better dressed than my
cousins and I, who had once so filled the solitude with the splashing of
our nets, and the excited din of our English voices.
As I sat down on a bench by the old willow (where the rat lived), and
gazed and gazed, it almost surprised me that the very intensity of my
desire did not of itself suffice to call up the old familiar faces and
forms, and conjure away these modern intruders.
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