Page:Once a Week Volume 8.djvu/552

544 forth with a volubility, to which only a Frenchwoman could ever hope to attain, on the ombrage délicieux of the acacias in her garden, quite undeterred by the fact that, in January, they were leafless.

“If we went to her we could even dine under their shade, in a bower, the scent of which was too delicious to be described.”

“And the insects, Madame, are they delicious also?” we ventured to remark.

In her well-regulated garden, it appeared, such things were never known. But then, we have the bad taste thoroughly to dislike al fresco meals, and we conceive them to be utter delusions as far as pleasure is concerned, even under the best circumstances. That this is an oddity, dear reader, we are well aware; but what would you have? English people are necessarily eccentric. To dine daily out of doors would be to us misery, and that being the case, we decline the possible enjoyments and certain draughts of the acacia bower, though with many assumed pangs of regret. Madame was inconsolable, so were we; and we parted the best of friends.

After some days we found ourselves possessors of a very picturesquely-situated house, surrounded on all sides by its garden. Beyond the stately pines stood our immovable army of guardians. Our sitting-rooms faced the sun, and opened on a wooden verandah-shaded gallery, which encircled the house, and from which a double flight of wooden stairs descended to the garden. We often wandered into the forest, the balmy medicated air of which is so celebrated for its beneficial effect in cases of affections of the lungs and chest, and discovered new beauties almost every day. As the season advanced the woodcutters began to be busy tapping the pine-trees, to make the turpentine flow.

On one occasion, as we were lying under a tree far up in the forest, a woodcutter, with an attendant satellite in the form of a black goat, began to scrape an adjoining pine, and we fraternised immensely. After discussing turpentine and resin, he begged for some information about England.

“Did it ever stop raining in our Fatherland?”

“But seldom, in Ireland, at least,” truth obliged us to confess.

“Had we any mountains there?”

Here, to make up for our candid admission about the rain, we delivered what appeared to us an incomparably eloquent oration on the beauties of our mountain chains. When we paused for a reply, our feelings received a terrible shock, for our résinier only said, Ah! he would not at all like English mountains from our description; they must apparently be only rocks—not sandhills, as they had in France. Besides, we had no “Bassin,” he heard, in England; n’est ce pas? With all our patriotism, we had to confess that le Bassin most undeniably did not exist in England, at which he was considerably, to our amusement, much elated.

When we wished for solitude we would stroll into the forest. In ten minutes we could find ourselves in the midst of complete and soothing silence, only now and then broken by the sounds from the hatchet of some distant woodcutter.

What a contrast if we turned our steps to the main street and Strand! There we find ourselves in the midst of a scene of animation and bustle, thoroughly French. The picturesque is scattered broadcast. How can we—with no colours but black and white at our disposal—paint the colours true to Nature? The very gamins, playing at marbles on the footway, seem to have studied the becoming in the arrangement of their clothes. Scarlet flannel coats abound; and the caps, of every shape and colour, are they not worn with the jauntiest of airs?

Here comes a procession of fishermen and fisherwomen, wending their way home from the Strand, on their return from oyster-dredging, laden with the baskets of their spoil. Which are the men, and which the women? One may well ask: it was some time before we discovered that the gay many-coloured silk-handkerchief floating from the heads of some of the party formed the peculiar characteristic of the feminine fisherman, who discards her petticoats in favour of immense fishing-boots reaching to the thigh, put on over her scarlet or blue flannel trousers.

Here comes, too, Mademoiselle Louise, blanchisseuse de fin, the beauty of Arcachon (where good looks abound), who, under the pretext of particularly wanting “just the smallest possible little grain of starch,” drops out, like her neighbours, for a gossip. How handsome the girl looks in her coquettish white cap, the border of which is crimped with marvellous art, and her hands jauntily placed in the pockets of her braided apron. Even Jacquot, generally considered the most morose of green parrots, unbends from his dignified reserve at the sight of her charms, and makes her a series of low, courtier-like bows from his perch at the épicier’s door. Jacquot is a favourite of ours; for he is the cleverest of clever birds. To us, too, he is always civility itself, though his temper (even the great have their weaknesses) is not, we must confess, always irreproachable, and he only admits a favoured few to terms of intimate friendship.

When we go over to him, and in a few flattering words praise the grace of the profound salaams with which he had honoured Mademoiselle Louise, as if quite overcome by the compliments, and yet anxious to show his gratitude for them, he sidles bashfully along his perch, and after pausing reflectively with averted, drooping head, as if to hide his blushes, he coyly offers us his hand in friendship, and finally clambers on our shoulder, from which eminence he harangues the busy street with, I am afraid, more vigour than politeness. He accompanies us most willingly in a short ramble to various shops, but when we think to inveigle him home with us, he makes such a violent attack on our hat, that with all speed we have to deposit him at his own door again, when we find great excitement prevailing among the gamins. An Irish friend of ours has appeared on the scene, and proposed foot-races to the boys, who seize, with the greatest eagerness on the idea, and cries of “''des courses! des courses!''” rend the air. Even a little four-year old, in purple pinafore,