322 PRÆTERITA-II

have ended with educating me and the likes of me, instead of the people who have hold of it now, with their polypous knots of houses, communal with “London, Paris, and New York.”

Beneath which, and on the esplanades of the modern casino, New York and London now live-no more the Genevese. What their home once was, I must try to tell, as I saw it.

85. First, it was a notable town for keeping all its poor,-inside of it. In the very centre, where an English town has its biggest square, and its Exchange on the model of the Parthenon, built for the sake of the builder’s commission on the cost;¹ there, on their little pile-propped island, and by the steep lane-sides, lived the Genevoise poor; in their garrets,-their laborious upper spinning or watch-wheel cutting rooms,-their dark niches and angles of lane: mostly busy; the infirm and old all seen to and cared for, their porringers filled and their pallet-beds made, by household care.

But, outside the ramparts, no more poor. A sputter, perhaps, southward, along the Savoy road; but in all the champaign round, no mean rows of cubic lodgings with Doric porches; no squalid fields of mud and thistles; no deserts of abandoned brickfield and insolvent kitchen garden. On the instant, outside Geneva gates, perfectly smooth, clean, trim-hedged or prim-walled country roads; the main broad one intent on far-away things, its signal-posts inscribed “Route de Paris”; branching from it, right and left, a labyrinth of equally well-kept ways for fine carriage wheels, between the gentlemen’s houses with their farms; each having its own fifteen to twenty to fifty acres of mostly meadow, rich-waving always (in my time for being there) with grass and flowers, like a kaleidoscope. Stately plane trees, aspen and walnut,-sometimes in avenue,-casting breezy, never gloomy, shade round the dwelling-house. A dwelling-house

¹ [Compare Vol. XXVII. p. 451, and Vol. XXVIII. p. 304.]

[Version 0.04: March 2008]