DECEMBER 121 



kins 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 Brit- 

 ish beef- and mutton -trained appetites. But what do I 

 not owe to the admirable woman who assisted her hus- 

 band 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 per- 

 sistent 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 

 monosyllable ! 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 ser- 

 vants, must have made it by diligence, and perhaps my 

 remembrance 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 Capuciu 



