and was full of wild and charming nooks.

His father, the widower, could not be consoled, and tried to wear out his
grief in long promenades, going out on clear evenings, holding his little
boy by the hand, toward the more solitary places. They followed those
fine boulevards, formerly in the suburbs, where there were giant elms,
planted in the time of Louis XIV, ditches full of grass, ruined
palisades, showing through their opening market-gardens where melons
glistened in the rays of the setting sun. Both were silent; the father
lost in reveries, Amedee absorbed in the confused dreams of a child.
They went long distances, passing the Barriere d'Enfer, reaching unknown
parts, which produced the same effect upon an inhabitant of Rue
Montmartre as the places upon an old map of the world, marked with the
mysterious words 'Mare ignotum', would upon a savant of the Middle Ages.
There were many houses in this ancient suburb; curious old buildings,
nearly all of one story.

Sometimes they would pass a public-house painted in a sinister wine-
color; or else a garden hedged in by acacias, at the fork of two roads,
with arbors and a sign consisting of a very small windmill at the end of
a pole, turning in the fresh evening breeze. It was almost country; the
grass grew upon the sidewalks, springing up in the road between the
broken pavements. A poppy flashed here and there upon the tops of the
low walls. They met very few people; now and then some poor person, a
woman in a cap dragging along a crying child, a workman burdened with his
tools, a belated invalid, and sometimes in the middle. of the sidewalk,
in a cloud of dust, a flock of exhausted sheep, bleating desperately, and
nipped in the legs by dogs hurrying them toward the abattoir. The father
and son would walk straight ahead until it was dark under the trees;
then they would retrace their steps, the sharp air stinging their faces.