Peter Ibbetson | Page 5

such a kingdom after five years of Gower Street and Bedford Square! For all things are relative, and everything depends upon the point of view. To the owner of Chatsworth (and to his gardeners) my beautiful French Garden would have seemed a small affair.
[Illustration: LE P'TIT ANGLAIS.]
And what a world of insects--Chatsworth could not beat these (indeed, is no doubt sadly lacking in them)--beautiful, interesting, comic, grotesque, and terrible; from the proud humble-bee to the earwig and his cousin, the devil's coach-horse; and all those rampant, many footed things that pullulate in damp and darkness under big flat stones. To think that I have been friends with all these--roses and centipedes and all--and then to think that most of my outer life has been spent between bare whitewashed walls, with never even a flea or a spider to be friends with again!
Our house (where, by-the-way, I had been born five years before), an old yellow house with green shutters and Mansard-roofs of slate, stood between this garden and the street--a long winding street, roughly flagged, with oil-lamps suspended across at long intervals; these lamps were let down with pulleys at dusk, replenished and lit, and then hauled up again to make darkness visible for a few hours on nights when the moon was away.
Opposite to us was a boys' school--"Maison d'éducation, Dirigée par M. Jules Saindou, Bachelier et Ma?tre ès Lettres et ès Sciences," and author of a treatise on geology, with such hauntingly terrific pictures of antediluvian reptiles battling in the primeval slime that I have never been able to forget them. My father, who was fond of science, made me a present of it on my sixth birthday. It cost me many a nightmare.
From our windows we could see and hear the boys at play--at a proper distance French boys sound just like English ones, though they do not look so, on account of their blue blouses and dusky, cropped heads--and we could see the gymnastic fixtures in the play-ground, M. Saindou's pride. "Le portique! la poutre! le cheval! et les barres parallèles!" Thus they were described in M. Saindou's prospectus.
On either side of the street (which was called "the Street of the Pump"), as far as eye could reach looking west, were dwelling-houses just like our own, only agreeably different; and garden walls overtopped with the foliage of horse-chestnut, sycamore, acacia, and lime; and here and there huge portals and iron gates defended by posts of stone gave ingress to mysterious abodes of brick and plaster and granite, many-shuttered, and embosomed in sun-shot greenery.
Looking east one could see in the near distance unsophisticated shops with old-fashioned windows of many panes--Liard, the grocer; Corbin, the poulterer; the butcher, the baker, the candlestick-maker.
And this delightful street, as it went on its winding way, led not to Bedford Square or the new University College Hospital, but to Paris through the Arc de Triomphe at one end, and to the river Seine at the other; or else, turning to the right, to St. Cloud through the Bois de Boulogne of Louis Philippe Premier, Roi des Fran?ais--as different from the Paris and the Bois de Boulogne of to-day as a diligence from an express train.
On one side of the beautiful garden was another beautiful garden, separated from ours by a high wall covered with peach and pear and plum and apricot trees; on the other, accessible to us through a small door in another lower wall clothed with jasmine, clematis, convolvulus, and nasturtium, was a long, straight avenue of almond-trees, acacia, laburnum, lilac, and may, so closely planted that the ivy-grown walls on either side could scarcely be seen. What lovely patches they made on the ground when the sun shone! One end of this abutted on "the Street of the Pump," from which it was fenced by tall, elaborately-carved iron gates between stone portals, and at the side was a "porte batarde," guarded by le Père et la Mère Fran?ois, the old concierge and his old wife. Peace to their ashes, and Heaven rest their kindly, genial souls!
The other end of the avenue, where there was also an iron gate, admitted to a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody, and of which we were free--a very wilderness of delight, a heaven, a terror of tangled thickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs, disused old quarries and dark caverns, prairies of lush grass, sedgy pools, turnip fields, forests of pine, groves and avenues of horse-chestnut, dank valleys of walnut-trees and hawthorn, which summer made dark at noon; bare, wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar; all sorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hide and small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure.
All this vast enclosure (full of strange singing,