apt to tell of the delights of Devonshire and of the charm of the upper Thames, with its tall rushes and low-thatched houses and quaint bridges, as if the picturesque ended there; forgetting that right here at home there wanders many a stream with its breast all silver that the trees courtesy to as it sings through meadows waist-high in lush grass,—as exquisite a picture as can be found this beautiful land over.

So, this being an old tramping-ground of mine, I have left the station with its noise and dust behind me this lovely morning in June, have stopped long enough to twist a bunch of sweet peas through the garden fence, and am standing on the bank waiting for some sign of life at Madame Laguerre's. I discover that there is no boat on my side of the stream. But that is of no moment. On the other side, within a biscuit's toss, so narrow is it, there are two boats; and on the landing-wharf, which is only a few planks wide, supporting a tumble-down flight of steps leading to a vine-covered terrace above, rest the oars.

I lay my traps down on the bank and begin at the top of my voice:—

"Madame Laguerre! Madame Laguerre! Send Lucette with the boat."

For a long time there is no response. A young girl drawing water a short distance below, hearing my cries, says she will come; and some children above, who know me, begin paddling over. I decline them all. Experience tells me it is better to wait for madame.

In a few minutes she pushes aside the leaves, peers through, and calls out:—

"Ah! it is that horrible painter. Go away! I have nothing for you. You are hungry again that you come?"

"Very, madame. Where is Lucette?"

"Lucette! Lucette! It is always Lucette. Lu-c-e-t-t-e!" This in a shrill key. "It is the painter. Come quick."

I have known Lucette for years, even when she was a barefooted little tangle-hair, peeping at me with her great brown eyes from beneath her ragged straw hat. She wears high-heeled slippers now, and sometimes on Sundays dainty silk stockings, and her hair is braided down her back, little French Marguérite that she is, and her hat is never ragged any more, nor her hair tangled. Her eyes, though, are still the same velvety, half-drooping eyes, always opening and shutting and never still.

As she springs into the boat and pulls towards me I note how round and trim she is, and before we have landed at Madame Laguerre's feet I have counted up Lucette's birthdays,—those that I know myself,—and find to my surprise that she must be eighteen. We have always been the best of friends, Lucette and I, ever since she looked over my shoulder years ago and watched me dot in the outlines of her boat, with her dog Mustif sitting demurely in the bow.

Madame, her mother, begins again:—

"Do you know that it is Saturday that you come again to bother? Now it will be a filet, of course, with mushrooms and tomato salad; and there are no mushrooms, and no tomatoes, and nothing. You are horrible. Then, when I get it ready, you say you will come at three. 'Yes, madame; at three,'—mimicking me,—'sure, very sure.' But it is four, five, o'clock—and then everything is burned up waiting. Ah! I know you."

This goes on always, and has for years. Presently she softens, for she is the most tender-hearted of women, and would do anything in the world to please me.

"But, then, you will be tired, and of course you must have something. I remember now there is a chicken. How will the chicken do? Oh, the chicken it is lovely, charmant. And some pease—fresh. Monsieur picked them himself this morning. And some Roquefort, with an olive. Ah! You leave it to me; but at three—no later—not one minute. Sacré! Vous êtes le diable!"

As we walk under the arbor and by the great trees, towards the cottage, Lucette following with the oars, I inquire after monsieur, and find that he is in the city, and very well and very busy, and will return at sundown. He has a shop of his own in the upper part where he makes passe-partouts. Here, at his home, madame maintains a simple restaurant for tramps like me.

These delightful people are old friends of mine, François Laguerre and his wife and their only child Lucette. They have lived here for nearly a quarter of a century. He is a straight, silver-haired old Frenchman of sixty, who left Paris, between two suns, nearly forty years ago, with a gendarme close at his heels, a red cockade under his coat, and an intense hatred in his heart for that "little nobody," Napoleon III.

If you met him on the boulevard you would look for the decoration on his lapel, remarking to yourself, "Some retired officer on half pay." If you met him at the railway station opposite, you would say, "A French professor returning to his school." Both of these surmises are partly wrong, and both partly right. Monsieur Laguerre has had a history. One can see by the deep lines in his forehead and by the firm set of his eyes and mouth that it has been an eventful one.

His wife is a few years his junior, short and stout, and thoroughly French down to the very toes of her felt slippers. She is devoted to François and Lucette, the best of cooks, and, in spite of her scoldings, good-nature itself. As soon as she hears me calling, there arise before her the visions of many delightful dinners prepared for me by her own hand and ready to the minute—all spoiled by my belated sketches. So she begins to scold before I am out of the boat or in it, for that matter.

Across the fence next to Laguerre's lives a confrère, a brother exile, Monsieur Marmosette, who also has a shop in the city, where he carves fine ivories. Monsieur Marmosette has only one son. He too is named François, after his father's old friend. Farther down on both sides of the narrow stream front the cottages of other friends, all Frenchmen; and near the propped-up bridge an Italian who knew Garibaldi burrows in a low, slanting cabin, which is covered with vines. I remember a dish of spaghetti under those vines, and a flask of Chianti from its cellar, all cobwebs and plaited straw, that left a taste of Venice in my mouth for days.

As there is only the great bridge above, which helps the country road across the little stream, and the little foot-bridge below, and as there is no path or road,—all the houses fronting the water,—the Bronx here is really the only highway, and so everybody must needs keep a boat. This is why the stream is crowded in the warm afternoons with all sorts of water craft loaded with whole families, even to the babies, taking the air, or crossing from bank to bank in their daily pursuits.

There is a quality which one never sees in Nature until she has been rough-handled by man and has outlived the usage. It is the picturesque. In the deep recesses of the primeval forest, along the mountain-slope, and away up the tumbling brook, Nature may be majestic, beautiful, and even sublime; but she is never picturesque. This quality comes only after the axe and the saw have let the sunlight into the dense tangle and have scattered the falling timber, or the round of the water-wheel has divided the rush of the brook. It is so here. Some hundred years ago, along this quiet, silvery stream were encamped the troops of the struggling colonies, and, later, the great estates of the survivors stretched on each side for miles. The willows that now fringe these banks were saplings then; and they and the great butternuts were only spared because their arching limbs shaded the cattle knee-deep along the shelving banks.

Then came the long interval that succeeds that deadly conversion of the once sweet farming lands, redolent with clover, into that barren waste—suburban property. The conflict that had