I had had a glimpse of it fifteen years ago, and another glimpse six years earlier, but both were so brief that they hardly counted.

The only notion of the town that remained in my mind was the memory of it as I had known it when I first quitted it twenty-nine years ago.

That picture of it was still as clear and vivid to me as a photograph.

I stepped ashore with the feeling of one who returns out of a dead-and-gone generation.

I had a sort of realizing sense of what the Bastille prisoners must have felt when they used to come out and look upon Paris after years of captivity, and note how curiously the familiar and the strange were mixed together before them.