120 MORE POT-POURRI 



then so much used in the poorer parts of Paris, exhibited 

 outside the little shops partly cut and showing their 

 yellow flesh, are among the recollections of those daily 

 walks to and from school. 



' We used to have our midday meal at the school, and 

 I have grim memories of the Friday maigre dinner, with 

 a sour bonne femme soup which did not please our 

 British beef- and mutton-trained appetites. But what 

 do I not owe to the admirable woman who assisted her 

 husband in his educational duties, and who stood over 

 Augustus and myself while with rigorous efforts she 

 endeavoured to convert our pronunciation of the French 

 word for bread from " pang " to " pain " ! How persistent 

 she was, that dear conscientious Frenchwoman ! How 

 often, with repeated and exaggerated aspiration of the 

 final "n," did she drive into our unaccustomed ears the 

 proper sound of that much (by Britons) murdered mono- 

 syllable ! And she succeeded at last, and broke the neck 

 of our initial difficulties in- French pronunciation. I 

 think I was nine years old at this time ; but the gloomy 

 little garden, with a horizontal gymnastic pole, and the 

 parallel bars under the one Lime-tree, the whole screened 

 off from the next-door estate by an ivy-covered trellis, are 

 present to my sight. 



' I have no recollection whatever of the journey from 

 Paris to Tours. We children, with the tutor and servants, 

 must have made it by diligence, and perhaps my remem- 

 brance of it has been obscured by the more vivid 

 impressions of the joys or the sufferings the difference 

 depending upon which direction I was going in of the 

 same journey several times performed on my way to and 

 from a school at Paris which I will refer to later on. 



' The house my father had taken at Tours was called 

 the " Grands Capucins" I believe, from being a house of 

 retreat or " pleasaunce " house belonging to a Capucin 



