 it will be
perceived, was modest; but the memory, beyond all reason and by some accident of
association, was sweet. The little Lambinet abode with him as the picture he
would have bought - the particular production that had made him for the moment
overstep the modesty of nature. He was quite aware that if he were to see it
again he should perhaps have a drop or a shock, and he never found himself
wishing that the wheel of time would turn it up again, just as he had seen it in
the maroon-coloured, sky-lighted inner shrine of Tremont Street. It would be a
different thing, however, to see the remembered mixture resolved back into its
elements - to assist at the restoration to nature of the whole far-away hour:
the dusty day in Boston, the background of the Fitchburg Depot, of the
maroon-coloured sanctum, the special-green vision, the ridiculous price, the
poplars, the willows, the rushes, the river, the sunny silvery sky, the shady
woody horizon.
    He observed in respect to his train almost no condition save that it should
stop a few times after getting out of the banlieue; he threw himself on the
general amiability of the day for the hint of where to alight. His theory of his
excursion was that he could alight anywhere - not nearer Paris than an hour's
run - on catching a suggestion of the particular note required. It made its
sign, the suggestion - weather, air, light, colour and his mood all favouring -
at the end of some eighty minutes; the train pulled up just at the right spot,
and he found himself getting out as securely as if to keep an appointment. It
will be felt of him that he could amuse himself, at his age, with very small
things if it be again noted that his appointment was only with a superseded
Boston fashion. He hadn't gone far without the quick confidence that it would be
quite sufficiently kept. The oblong gilt frame disposed its enclosing lines; the
poplars and willows, the reeds and river - a river of which he didn't know, and
didn't want to know, the name - fell into a composition, full of felicity,
within them; the sky was silver and turquoise and varnish; the village on the
left was white and the church on the right was grey; it was all there, in short
- it was what he wanted: it was Tremont Street, it was France, it was Lambinet.
Moreover he was freely walking about in it. He did
