noon
What lovely patches they made on the ground when the sun shone ! One end of this abutted on `` the Street of the Pump , '' from which it was fenced by tall , elaborately-carved iron gates between stone portals , and at the side was a `` porte bâtarde , '' guarded by le Père et la Mère François , the old concierge and his old wife . Peace to their ashes , and Heaven rest their kindly , genial souls ! The other end of the avenue , where there was also an iron gate , admitted to a large private park that seemed to belong to nobody , and of which we were free -- a very wilderness of delight , a heaven , a terror of tangled thickets and not too dangerous chalk cliffs , disused old quarries and dark caverns , prairies of lush grass , sedgy pools , turnip fields , forests of pine , groves and avenues of horse-chestnut , dank valleys of walnut-trees and hawthorn , which summer made dark at noon ; bare , wind-swept mountainous regions whence one could reconnoitre afar ; all sorts of wild and fearsome places for savages and wild beasts to hide and small boys to roam quite safely in quest of perilous adventure . All this vast enclosure -LRB- full of strange singing , humming , whistling , buzzing , twittering , cooing , booming , croaking , flying , creeping , crawling , jumping , climbing , burrowing , splashing , diving things -RRB- had been neglected for ages -- an Eden where one might gather and eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge without fear , and learn lovingly the ways of life without losing one 's innocence ; a forest that had remade for itself a new virginity , and become primeval once more ; where beautiful Nature had reasserted her own sweet will , and massed and tangled everything together as though a Beauty had been sleeping there undisturbed for close on a hundred years , and was only waiting for the charming Prince -- or , as it turned out a few years later , alas ! the speculative builder and the railway engineer -- those princes of our day . My fond remembrance would tell me that this region was almost boundless , well as I remember its boundaries .