The adventure, 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.