In another place we were shown a sort of summer arbor with a fence before it. We said that was nothing. We looked again and saw, through the arbor, an endless stretch of garden and shrubbery and grassy lawn. We were perfectly willing to go in there and rest, but it could not be done. It was only another delusions painting by some ingenious artist with little charity in his heart for tired folk. The deception was perfect. No one could have imagined the park was not real. We even thought we smelled the flowers at first.
We got a carriage at twilight and drove in the shaded avenues with the other nobility, and after dinner we took wine and ices in a fine garden with the great public. The music was excellent, the flowers and shrubbery were pleasant to the eye, the scene was vivacious, everybody was genteel and well behaved, and the ladies were slightly moustached, and handsomely dressed, but very homely.
We adjourned to a café and played billiards an hour, and I made six or seven points by the doctor pocketing his ball, and he made as many by my pocketing my ball. We came near making a carom sometimes, but not the one we were trying to make. The table was of the usual European style--cushions dead and twice as high as the balls; the cues in bad repair. The natives play only a sort of pool on them. We have never seen anybody playing the French three-ball game yet, and I doubt if there is any such game known in France or that there lives any man mad enough to try to play it on one of these European tables. We bad to stop playing finally because Dan got to sleeping fifteen minutes between the counts and paying no attention to his marking.