If there is a river of mneme as a counterpart of the river lethe, my cup of coffee must have got its water from that stream of memory.  If I could borrow that eloquence of Jouffroy which made his hearers turn pale, I might bring up before my readers a long array of pallid ghosts, whom these walls knew well in their earthly habiliments.  Only a single one of those I met here still survives.  The rest are mostly well-nigh forgotten by all but a few friends, or remembered chiefly in their children and grandchildren.

“How much?” I said to the garcon in his native tongue, or what I supposed to be that language. “Cinq sous,” was his answer.  By the laws of sentiment, I ought to have made the ignoble sum five francs, at least.  But if I had done so, the waiter would undoubtedly have thought that I had just come from Charenton.  Besides, why should I violate the simple habits and traditions of the place, where generation after generation of poor students and threadbare Bohemians had taken their morning coffee and pocketed their two lumps of sugar?  It was with a feeling of virile sanity and Roman self-conquest that I paid my five sous, with the small additional fraction which I supposed the waiter to expect, and no more.

So I passed for the last time over the threshold of the Cafe Procope, where Voltaire had matured his plays and Piron sharpened his epigrams; where Jouffroy had battled with his doubts and fears; where, since their time,—­since my days of Parisian life,—­the terrible storming youth, afterwards renowned as Leon Michel Gambetta, had startled the quiet guests with his noisy eloquence, till the old habitues spilled their coffee, and the red-capped students said to each other, "Il ira loin, ce gaillard-la!"

But what to me were these shadowy figures by the side of the group of my early friends and companions, that came up before me in all the freshness of their young manhood?  The memory of them recalls my own youthful days, and I need not go to Florida to bathe in the fountain of Ponce de Leon.

I have sometimes thought that I love so well the accidents of this temporary terrestrial residence, its endeared localities, its precious affections, its pleasing variety of occupation, its alternations of excited and gratified curiosity, and whatever else comes nearest to the longings of the natural man, that I might be wickedly homesick in a far-off spiritual realm where such toys are done with.  But there is a pretty lesson which I have often meditated, taught, not this time by the lilies of the field, but by the fruits of the garden.  When, in the June honeymoon of the seasons, the strawberry shows itself among the bridal gifts, many of us exclaim for the hundredth time with Dr. Boteler, “Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.”  Nature, who is God’s handmaid, does not attempt a rival berry.  But by and by a little woolly knob, which looked and saw with wonder