It stands with a swan-like grace amid lime-tree walk. The notary, the sousits waters; it holds, as in the days of préfet (is there a sous-préfet?), the Montmorency, a rare treasure of old curé perhaps, and some of the country pictures and priceless manuscripts; neighbors would come once a week to and so far as eye can reach from its play écarté, tric-trac, and boston with terraces, the lands and forests are sub- each other, and chat with us in a polject to its lord. Chantilly is in truth a ished little parlor, with squares of car great possession; and the Duc d'Au- pet in front of all the chairs. Once male, as we know, has no sons. He a week, on the afternoon consecrated has chosen the most gifted men of his by local fashion, we should walk on the country for his children, and Chantilly rampart and meet our neighbors, talk is bequeathed to the Institute of France. of the crops, and pull the government May the five Academies watch their to pieces (it stands a great deal of pulllaurels flower through many a spring ing !). We should shake our heads before they enter into their magnificent over the Conseil Municipal, but forgive inheritance ! the individual councillors, who are invariably amiable in private life. The terrible M. Dupont would give me a IF the day is cold or windy, drive cutting of Malmaison pinks for my through the forest of Hallatte to Creil, garden, and that breach would be and thence take the train to Compiègne, healed. Stop carriage! let us begin at for there blows a stiffish breeze across once that peaceful imaginary comedy the plateau of the Oise. But if mild of old age. But, ah, the little white airs and sun attend you, hire a light house is already out of sight. We are victoria, choose a good driver (you can in front of the shattered round towers get one to do the thing for five-and- of the thirteenth-century palace, all thirty francs or so), and set out by fringed with brown wallflowers against Senlis and Verberie for Compiègne. an azure sky. We climb higher still, 'Tis a matter of five-and-forty kilo- for see-here is the high, sunny little mètres; and to make the drive a suc- square where the tall cathedral stands. cess, you must stretch it a little further still, and go through the forest of Chantilly, round by St. Léonard, to Senlis.

III.

Senlis cathedral is a fine ogival build ing, its great porches arched around with sculptured saints and prophets. Senlis is a charming little town, There are two towers, one of them perched on a hill in true medieval topped by a surprising steeple, a hunfashion, and grouped in a cluster round dred feet in height, which is a landits fine cathedral and the ruins of the mark for all the country round. The castle of St. Louis (a real castle, this deep porches rich in shadow, the onc at least so much as is left of it). slender, lofty towers, compose an exHalf-way up the hill the antique bul- terior altogether simple, noble, and warks, turned into a raised and shady religious. To my thinking, Senlis, like walk, wear their elms and limes and all Gothic churches, is best seen from beeches like flowers amid a mural without. Within, that bare, unending crown. From this green garland the height of pillar, that cold, frigid solemstreets rise ever steeper, darker, more nity, that perfume of dreary Sabbath, irregular; yet not so narrow but that is less touching than the grand ye here and there we spy some white, half-modern house, with pots of pinks in the windows, and a garden full of flowers, which looks the natural home for some provincial heroine in a novel of Balzac's. I should like to end my days, I think, in just such a little town, to sit in my garden and receive my rare visitors under the green roof of the

homely massiveness of Romanesque, o even than the serene placidity of the classic revival. Who, unabashed, could say his prayers in these chill Gothic houses of the Lord, built apparently for the worship of giraffes or pelicans? Oh, for the little, low-roofed chapels of St. Marks, the unpretending grandeur of San Zenone or Sant' Ambrogio, or

nies of Hallatte, and mossy pine-knolls of Villers-Cotterets, are ye not as a necklace of green emeralds upon the breast of Mother Earth? But, shorn of their trees, the plains of Oise have not the grandeur, the ample solemn roll of the plains of Seine-et-Marne. 'Tis a lean, chill, flat, and, as it were, an angular sort of beauty; like some

even the simple, pious beauty of such a fare beautiful. O woods of Chantilly! Norman village church as St. Georges O birchen glades of Coye! O deep de Boscherville, near Rouen! Think and solemu vales of Compiègne, spinof the quaint, sombre poetry of Notre Dame du Port at Clermont-Ferrand, or Saint Trophime at Arles; or even the elegant and holy grace of the Parisian St. Etienne du Mont-those be the churches in which to say one's prayers. Whereas all your northern Gothic is a marvellous poem from without, but how frigid the chill interior of those august and chilling monuments! Duty thin thirteenth-century saint, divinely divorced from charity is not more cold; and I can easier imagine a filial and happy spirit of worship in the humblest square-towered parish church.

As it happened, we did not see the interior of Senlis at its best. The spring cleaning was in full force; the straw chairs heaped in an immense barricade by the font. In the middle of the cathedral-and really in the middle, dangling in mid-air like Socrates in his basket—an energetic charman was brushing the cobwebs from the capitals with a huge besom made of the dried, leafy boughs of trees. He had been hauled up there in a sort of crate by some ingenious system of ropes and pulleys. The one solitary figure in that vast chalky interior was not unpicturesque; it was like a caricature of any picture of Mr. Orchardson's.

IV.

graceful in her robes of verdure, more graceful beneath those plenteous folds than her better nourished sisters. But never choose her for your model of Venus Anadyomene. Leave her that imperial cloak of woods and forests.

We pass by fields of sun-smitten, withered pasture; by stretches of sad, precocious corn, already in car on its scanty span-high stems of green; by quarries and hamlets, into the deep wood of Hallatte; then forth again by more fields, ever bleaker, ever higher, till somehow suddenly we find ourselves on the steep brow of a down (they call it a mountain here, la Montagne de la Verberie), with below us, half seen through the poplar screens of the precipitous hillside, a lovely blue expanse of country with the Aisne lying across it like a scimitar of silver. Far away beyond the bridge, beyond the village in its meadows, depths of forest, blue and ever bluer, make an azure background that reaches out to Compiègne.

SENLIS was the capital of our friends the Sylvanectes. Hence stretched on either hand the vast forests which even We dash down the hill and clatter to-day are still considerable in a score along the sleepy pebbly village street, of relics the woods of Chantilly, past the inn full of blouses and bilLys, Coye, Ermenonville, Hallatte, liards, till the trees press thicker and Compiègne, Villers-Cotterets, etc., but thicker among the lengthening shadwhich in Gallo-Roman times were still ows. The forest is full of the peculiar one vast united breadth of forest. To- soft beauty that foreruns the summer day, all round Senlis the lands are dusk. These outskirts are fragrant. cleared, and the nearest woods, north with thorn-trees and acacia-trees. O or south, are some six miles away. white-flowing, delicate mock-acacias, We rumbled regretfully down the hill were I the king of France, I would out towards the windy plains of Valois, windiest plains that ever were; bleak champaigns where the sough and rushing of the wind sounds louder than at

multiply ye by all my highroads — for none is more beautiful to the eye and none is more majestic or more bountiful than you. Throughout this parched spring of 1893, when the hay is with

ered a span-high from the ground, your in the temple, something vast and long green leaves are fodder for our nameless-something that sighs and cattle, most succulent and sweet. And laments and chills, superhuman or antiwhat shall I say of your blossom-de- human, and has no place in any of our licious to every sense- an exquisite creeds. What is it, this obscure, relirain of white pearls dropping fragrant gious dread, this freezing of the blood perfumes from the tree, which, plucked and tension of the spirit, that locks us and delicately fried in batter, make a in a holy awe amid the shades of the beignet worthy of Lucullus ? I love nocturnal forest? Who knows? Peryour black and gnarled thorny trunk, haps a dim, unconscious memory of the so dark in its veil of lacy green and rites of our ancestors, Celts or Gerwhite, and it always seems to me that mans; a drop of the heart's blood of the nightingale sings sweeter than the Druid or the Alruna-woman, still elsewhere from your high and twisted alive in us after two thousand years. branches. They say that children fear the dark because they are still haunted of the dread of prowling beasts, they long obscurely for the blazing camp fire which keeps the wolves and bears at bay; an old anxious forest-fear survives in them and forbids them to sleep without that bright protection. Brr . . . I wish we could see the friendly glow to-night in the wood of Compiègne !

Here we are still on the rim of the forest. The white may-trees still in flower grow in rounds and rings together on the broken ground studded with silver birch. They stand in the dusky summer stillness, very fair and sweet, their muslin skirts spread white under the gleam of the rising moon. The lanky, sentimental young silver birches bend their heads above them, and sigh in the breeze. We passand as soon as we have passed, no blacksmith's forge, and then some doubt, they clasp their fragrant partners to their glittering breasts and whirl away in some mystic, pastoral May-dance to celebrate the spring.

At last, far off, there is in truth a glow as of a friendly beacon. 'Tis a

straggling houses. Again a space of scantier wood, and we clatter up the streets of the outlying faubourg. The streets grow steeper, the houses taller, our pace quicker and more exhilarat ing. And at last we draw up with a clack of the whip before the famous friendly Hôtel de la Cloche at Com

But we go on, still on. The trees press closer and closer. They are now great forest-trees. The wind soughs among them in utter melancholy. Far away, here and there, a thin spectre piègne. of moonlight glides between their branches. Have you ever felt at night in some deep glade the holy horror of the forest? If not, you have no Druid and no Dryad among your ancestry. You have never felt with a shudder just how they sacrificed the victim on yonder smooth, grey slab, by moonlight, to the Forest God! Think, on this very spot, the moonlight fell even as it falls to-night, among the gleaming beeches, ere ever the Romans entered Gaul. Man has never sown or reaped his harvest on this sacred soil; it is still consecrate to the God of Forests. The beech-boughs rustle immemorial secrets; the oaks shoot up their trunks of mail, like columns to support the temple roof. And there is something

THE market is in full swing when we throw our shutters open in the morning, and the gay, wide square is full of booths and country people, clus tered round the bronze statue of Joan of Arc. (It was here, you know, we worse luck to us! at the gate of Compiègne. But it was at Rouen she made her entry, and that exit for which, alas! we stand ashamed through history.) Nothing could look cheerfuller than the market-place this morning. It tempts us out; and then we find that we could not see the best of it from the windows. For cheek by jowl with our hotel stands the fine Hôtel de Ville, with its fretted Flem

ish-looking front and its tall belfry for | towards sunset in the Bas-Bréau. Here the chimes. It was finished in 1510, the oaks shoot up to an inconceivable when Louis XII. was king. There he height, erect and branchless, until they rides, on the large arcade on the first meet at last in a roof of verdure just story, every inch a king; but the statue tinged with April rose and gold. If is modern. Fontainebleau reminds us of a comedy Gay, bright, with charming environs, of Shakespeare, Compiègne has the Compiègne is a pleasant county town; noble and ordered beauty, the heroic but it has not that look of age, of his- sentiment of Racine. What solemn toric continuity, which are the charm arches and avenues of beeches; what of smaller places such as Crepy and depths of forest widening into unexSenlis. No sign is left of the great pected valleys, rippling in meadowpalace of the Merovingian kings, no grass, where the hamlet clusters round relic of that stalwart fortress whence its ruined abbey; what magical lakes are dated so many of the acts of Charles and waters interchained where the the Wise; that castle of Compiègne wooded hills shine bright in doubled where, says Eustache Deschamps, beauty. Ah, Fontainebleau after all is "Tel froid y fait en yver que c'est a blind poet; the forest is ignorant of raige," "built against the river bridge, | lake and river. But Compiègne has the "le Chastel que se lance Dessus Aysne, Oise and the Aisne, and the Automne lez le pont du rivaige." Bit by bit one #discovers, lost in the modern prosperity of the place, here and there a souvenir of the more illustrious past. Certain roads in the forest were planned and laid out by Francis the First. Here and there, on the limits of the town, a towered wall rises in some private garden, and we recognize a fragment of the fortifications raised under Joan of Arc. Then there is the city gate, built by Philibert Delorme in 1552, with the initials of Henry and Diana interlaced. A few old houses still remain from the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, and among them that Hôtel des Rats where Henri IV. lived with Gabrielle d'Estrées in 1591. There are one or two old churches, too much restored. And then, of course, there is the great interesting palace, the very twin of the Palais Royal, which Gabriel built for Louis XV., and which we remember for the sake of the two Napoleons.

- Compiègne has its lakes and tarns, and pools innumerable, its seven-andtwenty limpid brooks, its wells and ripples in every valley-bottom. The loose soil, rich with this continual irrigation, teems with flowers. The seal of Solomon waves above the hosts of lily of the valley. The wood-strawberry and wild anemone enamel the grass with their pale stars. Here and there on the sandier slopes a deep carpet of bluebells, or at the water's edge a brilliant embroidery of kingcups, gives point to the sweet monotony of white and green, which vibrates from the flowers in the grass to the flowering may-bushes, to the acacias only half in blossom, and thence more faintly to the lady birch and beech with gleaming trunks and delicate foliage. White and green appear again in the wide sheets of water amid the shimmering woods. So I shall always think of the wood of Compiègne as of some paradise, too The charm, the attraction, of Com- perfect for violent hue and passionate piègne is elsewhere. The forest here color some Eden haunted only by the is beautiful as Fontainebleau. True, souls of virgins, sweet with all fresh, here are none of the wild, romantic pure scents, white with white flowers, deserts, the piled crags hoary with juni- and green with the delicate trembling per, the narrow gorges, and sudden, green of April leaves. immense vistas of Fontainebleau. The trees themselves have a different character. We find few of those great

VI.

WHERE shall we go to-day? There

gnarled and hollow giants whose twisted are many lovely drives in the forest. arms made such uncanny shadows Champlieu has its Roman camp, its an

tique theatre and temple. Morienval | Somewhere among the flowers, out of its abbey church with the three Norman sight, but never out of hearing, runs towers; St. Nicolas its priory, St. Pierre the stream that feeds the mill, the Ru its ruins, St. Jean its marvellous old de Berne.

trees, and St. Perrine its lakes where the deer come to die. Shall I confess that we know these beauties still by rumor only? For we went first of all by the foot of Mont St. Mard to the hamlet of the old mill and round the lakes of La Rouillie to Pierrefonds. And on the morrow, when we set out for Champlieu or St. Jean, after the first mile, we would cry to the driver, "Go back and take us the same drive as yesterday." And so three times we drove past the Vieux Moulin.

This is a sad confession. But, reader, if ever you visit Compiègne go last to Pierrefonds, round by the Vieux Moulin, or, however long you stay, you will never see the rest.

VII.

The hamlet is clustered at the nearer end, a hundred or so dark little houses, irregularly grouped round an odd little church with a wide, hospitable verandah, all the way round it, and a quaint, balconied spire. The houses are gay with climbing roses -out in flower, to my astonishment, on this 28th of April; and in their little gardens the peonies are pink and crimson. It has quite the look of a Swiss hamlet; and, if you choose, there is an "ascension" to be made! True, the Mont St. Mard can be climbed in some three-quarters of an hour; but none the less its summit boasts a matchless view. See, all the forest at our feet, with its abbeys and hamlets, and lakes and rivers, out to the blue plains streaked with woods, where Noyon and Soissons emerge like LET us set out again for the Vieux jewels circled in an azure setting. Moulin! We are soon deep in woods The view is quite as beautiful if we of oak and beech. We pass the stately keep to the valley. The meadows avenues of the Beaux Monts; a steeper grow lusher and sedgier, and the king height towers above us. See how won-cup gives place to the bulrush, and the derful is this deep green glen where bulrush to the water-lily, till, behold, the oaks rise sheer to an immeasurable our meadows have changed into a lake, height from the sheet of lily of the a chain of winding waters, in which valley at their feet! The picturesque the wooded hills are brightly mirrored. declivity of the dell, the beautiful The road winds on between the wood growth of the trees, the whiteness and and the water till we reach a long. sweetness and profusion of the flowers, slow, mild ascent, and at the top of it the something delicate, lofty, and seri- we find ourselves upon the outskirts of ous about this landscape, makes a rare a little town. A sudden turn of the impression amid the opulence of April. road reveals the picturesque village. Our glade slopes downward from the scattered over several roundly swelling base of Mont St. Mard; at its further hills, but clustered thickliest round an extremity begins the valley of the abrupt and wooded cliff, steeper than Vieux Moulin. the others, and surmounted by a huge It is a valley of meadow land beside medieval fortress, one frown of battlea stream, which, thousands of years ments, turrets, and watch-towers be ago, must have cut the shallow gorge hind its tremendous walls. Below the in which it lies. On either side rises castle and the rock, and in the depth of a line of hills, not high but steep and the valley, lies a tiny lake, quite round. wooded. There is just room in the girdled with quinconces and alleys of valley for the small, Alpine-looking clipped lime. Far away, beyond the hamlet and its hay-meadows. They hills, on every side, the deep-blue for are full of flowers; marsh-flowers down est hems us in. Except Clisson in by the stream, with, higher up, sheets Vendée, I can think of no little tow of blue sage and yellow cowslip, and so picturesque, so almost theatric here and there a taller meadow-orchid. the perfection of its mise

en sobe