The morning cleared a little, and the sky was once more the old
stone-coloured vault over the sallow meadows and the russet woods,
as I set forth on a dog-cart from Wendover to Tring.  The road lay
for a good distance along the side of the hills, with the great
plain below on one hand, and the beech-woods above on the other.
The fields were busy with people ploughing and sowing; every here
and there a jug of ale stood in the angle of the hedge, and I could
see many a team wait smoking in the furrow as ploughman or sower
stepped aside for a moment to take a draught.  Over all the brown
ploughlands, and under all the leafless hedgerows, there was a
stout piece of labour abroad, and, as it were, a spirit of picnic.
The horses smoked and the men laboured and shouted and drank in the
sharp autumn morning; so that one had a strong effect of large,
open-air existence.  The fellow who drove me was something of a
humourist; and his conversation was all in praise of an
agricultural labourer's way of life.  It was he who called my
attention to these jugs of ale by the hedgerow; he could not
sufficiently express the liberality of these men's wages; he told
me how sharp an appetite was given by breaking up the earth in the
morning air, whether with plough or spade, and cordially admired
this provision of nature.  He sang O fortunatos agricolas! indeed,
in every possible key, and with many cunning inflections, till I
began to wonder what was the use of such people as Mr. Arch, and to
sing the same air myself in a more diffident manner.

Tring was reached, and then Tring railway-station; for the two are
not very near, the good people of Tring having held the railway, of
old days, in extreme apprehension, lest some day it should break
loose in the town and work mischief.  I had a last walk, among
russet beeches as usual, and the air filled, as usual, with the
carolling of larks; I heard shots fired in the distance, and saw,
as a new sign of the fulfilled autumn, two horsemen exercising a
pack of fox-hounds.  And then the train came and carried me back to
London.



CHAPTER IV--A WINTER'S WALK IN CARRICK AND GALLOWAY--A FRAGMENT--
1876



At the famous bridge of Doon, Kyle, the central district of the
shire of Ayr, marches with Carrick, the most southerly.  On the
Carrick side of the river rises a hill of somewhat gentle
conformation, cleft with shallow dells, and sown here and there
with farms and tufts of wood.  Inland, it loses itself, joining, I
suppose, the great herd of similar hills that occupies the centre
of the Lowlands.  Towards the sea it swells out the coast-line into
a protuberance, like a bay-window in a plan, and is fortified
against the surf behind bold crags.  This hill is known as the
Brown Hill of Carrick, or, more shortly, Brown Carrick.

It had snowed overnight.  The fields were all sheeted up; they were
tucked in among the snow, and their shape was modelled through the
pliant counterpane, like children tucked in by a fond mother.  The
wind had made ripples and folds upon the surface, like what the
sea, in quiet weather, leaves upon the sand.  There was a frosty
stifle in the air.  An effusion of coppery light on the summit of
Brown Carrick showed where the sun was trying to look through; but
along the horizon clouds of cold fog had settled down, so that
there was no distinction of sky and sea.  Over the white shoulders
of the headlands, or in the opening of bays, there was nothing but
a great vacancy and blackness; and the road as it drew near the
edge of the cliff seemed to skirt the shores of creation and void
space.

The snow crunched under foot, and at farms all the dogs broke out
barking as they smelt a passer-by upon the road.  I met a fine old
fellow, who might have sat as the father in 'The Cottar's Saturday
Night,' and who swore most heathenishly at a cow he was driving.
And a little after I scraped acquaintance with a poor body tramping
out to gather cockles.  His face was wrinkled by exposure; it was
broken up into flakes and channels, like mud beginning to dry, and
weathered in two colours, an incongruous pink and grey.  He had a
faint air of being surprised--which, God knows, he might well be--
that life had gone so ill with him.  The shape of his trousers was
in itself a jest, so strangely were they bagged and ravelled about
his knees; and his coat was all bedaubed with clay as tough he had
lain in a rain-dub during the New Year's festivity.  I will own I
was not sorry to think he had had a merry New Year, and been young
again for an evening; but I was sorry to see the mark still there.
One could not expect such an old gentleman to be much of a dandy or
a great student of respectability in dress; but there might have
been a wife at home, who had brushed out similar stains after fifty
New Years, now become old, or a round-armed daughter, who would
wish to have him neat, were it only out of self-respect and for the
ploughman sweetheart when he looks round at night.  Plainly, there
was nothing of this in his life, and years and loneliness hung
heavily on his old arms.  He was seventy-six, he told me; and
nobody would give a day's work to a man that age:  they would think
he couldn't do it.  'And, 'deed,' he went on, with a sad little
chuckle, ''deed, I doubt if I could.'  He said goodbye to me at a
footpath, and crippled wearily off to his work.  It will make your
heart ache if you think of his old fingers groping in the snow.

He told me I was to turn down beside the school-house for Dunure.
And so, when I found a lone house among the snow, and heard a
babble of childish voices from within, I struck off into a steep
road leading downwards to the sea.  Dunure lies close under the
steep hill:  a haven among the rocks, a breakwater in consummate
disrepair, much apparatus for drying nets, and a score or so of
fishers' houses.  Hard by, a few shards of ruined castle overhang
the sea, a few vaults, and one tall gable honeycombed with windows.
The snow lay on the beach to the tidemark.  It was daubed on to the
sills of the ruin:  it roosted in the crannies of the rock like
white sea-birds; even on outlying reefs there would be a little
cock of snow, like a toy lighthouse.  Everything was grey and white
in a cold and dolorous sort of shepherd's plaid.  In the profound
silence, broken only by the noise of oars at sea, a horn was
sounded twice; and I saw the postman, girt with two bags, pause a
moment at the end of the clachan for letters.

It is, perhaps, characteristic of Dunure that none were brought
him.

The people at the public-house did not seem well pleased to see me,
and though I would fain have stayed by the kitchen fire, sent me
'ben the hoose' into the guest-room.  This guest-room at Dunure was
painted in quite aesthetic fashion.  There are rooms in the same
taste not a hundred miles from London, where persons of an extreme
sensibility meet together without embarrassment.  It was all in a
fine dull bottle-green and black; a grave harmonious piece of
colouring, with nothing, so far as coarser folk can judge, to hurt
the better feelings of the most exquisite purist.  A cherry-red
half window-blind kept up an imaginary warmth in the cold room, and
threw quite a glow on the floor.  Twelve cockle-shells and a half-
penny china figure were ranged solemnly along the mantel-shelf.
Even the spittoon was an original note, and instead of sawdust
contained sea-shells.  And as for the hearthrug, it would merit an
article to itself, and a coloured diagram to help the text.  It was
patchwork, but the patchwork of the poor; no glowing shreds of old
brocade and Chinese silk, shaken together in the kaleidoscope of
some tasteful housewife's fancy; but a work of art in its own way,
and plainly a labour of love.  The patches came exclusively from
people's raiment.  There was no colour more brilliant than a
heather mixture; 'My Johnny's grey breeks,' well polished over the
oar on the boat's thwart, entered largely into its composition.
And the spoils of an old black cloth coat, that had been many a
Sunday to church, added something (save the mark!) of preciousness
to the material.

While I was at luncheon four carters came in--long-limbed, muscular
Ayrshire Scots, with lean, intelligent faces.  Four quarts of stout
were ordered; they kept filling the tumbler with the other hand as
they drank; and in less time than it takes me to write these words
the four quarts were finished--another round was proposed,
discussed, and negatived--and they were creaking out of the village
with their carts.

The ruins drew you towards them.  You never saw any place more
desolate from a distance, nor one that less belied its promise near
at hand.  Some crows and gulls flew away croaking as I scrambled
in.  The snow had drifted into the vaults.  The clachan dabbled
with snow, the white hills, the black sky, the sea marked in the
coves with faint circular wrinkles, the whole world, as it looked
from a loop-hole in Dunure, was cold, wretched, and out-at-elbows.
If you had been a wicked baron and compelled to stay there all the
afternoon, you would have had a rare fit of remorse.  How you would
have heaped up the fire and gnawed your fingers!  I think it would
have come to homicide before the evening--if it were only for the
pleasure of seeing something red!  And the masters of Dunure, it is
to be noticed, were remarkable of old for inhumanity.  One of these
vaults where the snow had drifted was that 'black route' where 'Mr.
Alane Stewart, Commendatour of Crossraguel,' endured his fiery
trials.  On the 1st and 7th of September 1570 (ill dates for Mr.
Alan!), Gilbert, Earl of Cassilis, his chaplain, his baker, his
cook, his pantryman, and another servant, bound the Poor
Commendator 'betwix an iron chimlay and a fire,' and there cruelly
roasted him until he signed away his abbacy. it is one of the
ugliest stories of an ugly period, but not, somehow, without such a
flavour of the ridiculous as makes it hard to sympathise quite
seriously with the victim.  And it is consoling to remember that he
got away at last, and kept his abbacy, and, over and above, had a
pension from the Earl until he died.

Some way beyond Dunure a wide bay, of somewhat less unkindly
aspect, opened out.  Colzean plantations lay all along the steep
shore, and there was a wooded hill towards the centre, where the
trees made a sort of shadowy etching over the snow.  The road went
down and up, and past a blacksmith's cottage that made fine music
in the valley.  Three compatriots of Burns drove up to me in a
cart.  They were all drunk, and asked me jeeringly if this was the
way to Dunure.  I told them it was; and my answer was received with
unfeigned merriment.  One gentleman was so much tickled he nearly
fell out of the cart; indeed, he was only saved by a companion, who
either had not so fine a sense of humour or had drunken less.

'The toune of Mayboll,' says the inimitable Abercrummie, {3}
'stands upon an ascending ground from east to west, and lyes open
to the south.  It hath one principals street, with houses upon both
sides, built of freestone; and it is beautifyed with the situation
of two castles, one at each end of this street.  That on the east
belongs to the Erle of Cassilis.  On the west end is a castle,
which belonged sometime to the laird of Blairquan, which is now the
tolbuith, and is adorned with a pyremide [conical roof], and a row
of ballesters round it raised from the top of the staircase, into
which they have mounted a fyne clock.  There be four lanes which
pass from the principall street; one is called the Black Vennel,
which is steep, declining to the south-west, and leads to a lower
street, which is far larger than the high chiefe street, and it
runs from the Kirkland to the Well Trees, in which there have been
many pretty buildings, belonging to the severall gentry of the
countrey, who were wont to resort thither in winter, and divert
themselves in converse together at their owne houses.  It was once
the principall street of the town; but many of these houses of the
gentry having been decayed and ruined, it has lost much of its
ancient beautie.  Just opposite to this vennel, there is another
that leads north-west, from the chiefe street to the green, which
is a pleasant plott of ground, enclosed round with an earthen wall,
wherein they were wont to play football, but now at the Gowff and
byasse-bowls.  The houses of this towne, on both sides of the
street, have their several gardens belonging to them; and in the
lower street there be some pretty orchards, that yield store of
good fruit.'  As Patterson says, this description is near enough
even to-day, and is mighty nicely written to boot.  I am bound to
add, of my own experience, that Maybole is tumbledown and dreary.
Prosperous enough in reality, it has an air of decay; and though
the population has increased, a roofless house every here and there
seems to protest the contrary.  The women are more than well-
favoured, and the men fine tall fellows; but they look slipshod and
dissipated.  As they slouched at street corners, or stood about
gossiping in the snow, it seemed they would have been more at home
in the slums of a large city than here in a country place betwixt a
village and a town.  I heard a great deal about drinking, and a
great deal about religious revivals:  two things in which the
Scottish character is emphatic and most unlovely.  In particular, I
heard of clergymen who were employing their time in explaining to a
delighted audience the physics of the Second Coming.  It is not
very likely any of us will be asked to help. if we were, it is
likely we should receive instructions for the occasion, and that on
more reliable authority.  And so I can only figure to myself a
congregation truly curious in such flights of theological fancy, as
one of veteran and accomplished saints, who have fought the good
fight to an end and outlived all worldly passion, and are to be
regarded rather as a part of the Church Triumphant than the poor,
imperfect company on earth.  And yet I saw some young fellows about
the smoking-room who seemed, in the eyes of one who cannot count
himself strait-laced, in need of some more practical sort of
teaching.  They seemed only eager to get drunk, and to do so
speedily.  It was not much more than a week after the New Year; and
to hear them return on their past bouts with a gusto unspeakable
was not altogether pleasing.  Here is one snatch of talk, for the
accuracy of which I can vouch-

'Ye had a spree here last Tuesday?'

'We had that!'

'I wasna able to be oot o' my bed.  Man, I was awful bad on
Wednesday.'

'Ay, ye were gey bad.'

And you should have seen the bright eyes, and heard the sensual
accents!  They recalled their doings with devout gusto and a sort
of rational pride.  Schoolboys, after their first drunkenness, are
not more boastful; a cock does not plume himself with a more
unmingled satisfaction as he paces forth among his harem; and yet
these were grown men, and by no means short of wit.  It was hard to
suppose they were very eager about the Second Coming:  it seemed as
if some elementary notions of temperance for the men and seemliness
for the women would have gone nearer the mark.  And yet, as it
seemed to me typical of much that is evil in Scotland, Maybole is
also typical of much that is best.  Some of the factories, which
have taken the place of weaving in the town's economy, were
originally founded and are still possessed by self-made men of the
sterling, stout old breed--fellows who made some little bit of an
invention, borrowed some little pocketful of capital, and then,
step by step, in courage, thrift and industry, fought their way
upwards to an assured position.

Abercrummie has told you enough of the Tolbooth; but, as a bit of
spelling, this inscription on the Tolbooth bell seems too delicious
to withhold:  'This bell is founded at Maiboll Bi Danel Geli, a
Frenchman, the 6th November, 1696, Bi appointment of the heritors
of the parish of Maiyboll.'  The Castle deserves more notice.  It
is a large and shapely tower, plain from the ground upwards, but
with a zone of ornamentation running about the top.  In a general
way this adornment is perched on the very summit of the chimney-
stacks; but there is one corner more elaborate than the rest.  A
very heavy string-course runs round the upper story, and just above
this, facing up the street, the tower carries a small oriel window,
fluted and corbelled and carved about with stone heads.  It is so
ornate it has somewhat the air of a shrine.  And it was, indeed,
the casket of a very precious jewel, for in the room to which it
gives light lay, for long years, the heroine of the sweet old
ballad of 'Johnnie Faa'--she who, at the call of the gipsies'
songs, 'came tripping down the stair, and all her maids before
her.'  Some people say the ballad has no basis in fact, and have
written, I believe, unanswerable papers to the proof.  But in the
face of all that, the very look of that high oriel window convinces
the imagination, and we enter into all the sorrows of the
imprisoned dame.  We conceive the burthen of the long, lack-lustre
days, when she leaned her sick head against the mullions, and saw
the burghers loafing in Maybole High Street, and the children at
play, and ruffling gallants riding by from hunt or foray.  We
conceive the passion of odd moments, when the wind threw up to her
some snatch of song, and her heart grew hot within her, and her
eyes overflowed at the memory of the past.  And even if the tale be
not true of this or that lady, or this or that old tower, it is
true in the essence of all men and women:  for all of us, some time
or other, hear the gipsies singing; over all of us is the glamour
cast.  Some resist and sit resolutely by the fire.  Most go and are
brought back again, like Lady Cassilis.  A few, of the tribe of
Waring, go and are seen no more; only now and again, at springtime,
when the gipsies' song is afloat in the amethyst evening, we can
catch their voices in the glee.

By night it was clearer, and Maybole more visible than during the
day.  Clouds coursed over the sky in great masses; the full moon
battled the other way, and lit up the snow with gleams of flying
silver; the town came down the hill in a cascade of brown gables,
bestridden by smooth white roofs, and sprangled here and there with
lighted windows.  At either end the snow stood high up in the
darkness, on the peak of the Tolbooth and among the chimneys of the
Castle.  As the moon flashed a bull's-eye glitter across the town
between the racing clouds, the white roofs leaped into relief over
the gables and the chimney-stacks, and their shadows over the white
roofs.  In the town itself the lit face of the clock peered down
the street; an hour was hammered out on Mr. Geli's bell, and from
behind the red curtains of a public-house some one trolled out--a
compatriot of Burns, again!--'The saut tear blin's my e'e.'

Next morning there was sun and a flapping wind.  From the street
corners of Maybole I could catch breezy glimpses of green fields.
The road underfoot was wet and heavy--part ice, part snow, part
water, and any one I met greeted me, by way of salutation, with 'A
fine thowe' (thaw).  My way lay among rather bleak bills, and past
bleak ponds and dilapidated castles and monasteries, to the
Highland-looking village of Kirkoswald.  It has little claim to
notice, save that Burns came there to study surveying in the summer
of 1777, and there also, in the kirkyard, the original of Tam o'
Shanter sleeps his last sleep.  It is worth noticing, however, that
this was the first place I thought 'Highland-looking.'  Over the
bill from Kirkoswald a farm-road leads to the coast.  As I came
down above Turnberry, the sea view was indeed strangely different
from the day before.  The cold fogs were all blown away; and there
was Ailsa Craig, like a refraction, magnified and deformed, of the
Bass Rock; and there were the chiselled mountain-tops of Arran,
veined and tipped with snow; and behind, and fainter, the low, blue
land of Cantyre.  Cottony clouds stood in a great castle over the
top of Arran, and blew out in long streamers to the south.  The sea
was bitten all over with white; little ships, tacking up and down
the Firth, lay over at different angles in the wind.  On Shanter
they were ploughing lea; a cart foal, all in a field by himself,
capered and whinnied as if the spring were in him.

The road from Turnberry to Girvan lies along the shore, among sand-
hills and by wildernesses of tumbled bent.  Every here and there a
few cottages stood together beside a bridge.  They had one odd
feature, not easy to describe in words:  a triangular porch
projected from above the door, supported at the apex by a single
upright post; a secondary door was hinged to the post, and could be
hasped on either cheek of the real entrance; so, whether the wind
was north or south, the cotter could make himself a triangular
bight of shelter where to set his chair and finish a pipe with
comfort.  There is one objection to this device; for, as the post
stands in the middle of the fairway, any one precipitately issuing
from the cottage must run his chance of a broken head.  So far as I
am aware, it is peculiar to the little corner of country about
Girvan.  And that corner is noticeable for more reasons:  it is
certainly one of the most characteristic districts in Scotland, It
has this movable porch by way of architecture; it has, as we shall
see, a sort of remnant of provincial costume, and it has the
handsomest population in the Lowlands. . . .



CHAPTER V--FOREST NOTES 1875-6



ON THE PLAIN


Perhaps the reader knows already the aspect of the great levels of
the Gatinais, where they border with the wooded hills of
Fontainebleau.  Here and there a few grey rocks creep out of the
forest as if to sun themselves.  Here and there a few apple-trees
stand together on a knoll.  The quaint, undignified tartan of a
myriad small fields dies out into the distance; the strips blend
and disappear; and the dead flat lies forth open and empty, with no
accident save perhaps a thin line of trees or faint church spire
against the sky.  Solemn and vast at all times, in spite of
pettiness in the near details, the impression becomes more solemn
and vast towards evening.  The sun goes down, a swollen orange, as
it were into the sea.  A blue-clad peasant rides home, with a
harrow smoking behind him among the dry clods.  Another still works
with his wife in their little strip.  An immense shadow fills the
plain; these people stand in it up to their shoulders; and their
heads, as they stoop over their work and rise again, are relieved
from time to time against the golden sky.

These peasant farmers are well off nowadays, and not by any means
overworked; but somehow you always see in them the historical
representative of the serf of yore, and think not so much of
present times, which may be prosperous enough, as of the old days
when the peasant was taxed beyond possibility of payment, and
lived, in Michelet's image, like a hare between two furrows.  These
very people now weeding their patch under the broad sunset, that
very man and his wife, it seems to us, have suffered all the wrongs
of France.  It is they who have been their country's scapegoat for
long ages; they who, generation after generation, have sowed and
not reaped, reaped and another has garnered; and who have now
entered into their reward, and enjoy their good things in their
turn.  For the days are gone by when the Seigneur ruled and
profited.  'Le Seigneur,' says the old formula, 'enferme ses
manants comme sous porte et gonds, du ciel a la terre.  Tout est a
lui, foret chenue, oiseau dans l'air, poisson dans l'eau, bete an
buisson, l'onde qui coule, la cloche dont le son au loin roule.'
Such was his old state of sovereignty, a local god rather than a
mere king.  And now you may ask yourself where he is, and look
round for vestiges of my late lord, and in all the country-side
there is no trace of him but his forlorn and fallen mansion.  At
the end of a long avenue, now sown with grain, in the midst of a
close full of cypresses and lilacs, ducks and crowing chanticleers
and droning bees, the old chateau lifts its red chimneys and peaked
roofs and turning vanes into the wind and sun.  There is a glad
spring bustle in the air, perhaps, and the lilacs are all in
flower, and the creepers green about the broken balustrade:  but no
spring shall revive the honour of the place.  Old women of the
people, little, children of the people, saunter and gambol in the
walled court or feed the ducks in the neglected moat.  Plough-
horses, mighty of limb, browse in the long stables.  The dial-hand
on the clock waits for some better hour.  Out on the plain, where
hot sweat trickles into men's eyes, and the spade goes in deep and
comes up slowly, perhaps the peasant may feel a movement of joy at
his heart when he thinks that these spacious chimneys are now cold,
which have so often blazed and flickered upon gay folk at supper,
while he and his hollow-eyed children watched through the night
with empty bellies and cold feet.  And perhaps, as he raises his
head and sees the forest lying like a coast-line of low hills along
the sea-level of the plain, perhaps forest and chateau hold no
unsimilar place in his affections.

If the chateau was my lord's, the forest was my lord the king's;
neither of them for this poor Jacques.  If he thought to eke out
his meagre way of life by some petty theft of wood for the fire, or
for a new roof-tree, he found himself face to face with a whole
department, from the Grand Master of the Woods and Waters, who was
a high-born lord, down to the common sergeant, who was a peasant
like himself, and wore stripes or a bandoleer by way of uniform.
For the first offence, by the Salic law, there was a fine of
fifteen sols; and should a man be taken more than once in fault, or
circumstances aggravate the colour of his guilt, he might be
whipped, branded, or hanged.  There was a hangman over at Melun,
and, I doubt not, a fine tall gibbet hard by the town gate, where
Jacques might see his fellows dangle against the sky as he went to
market.

And then, if he lived near to a cover, there would be the more
hares and rabbits to eat out his harvest, and the more hunters to
trample it down.  My lord has a new horn from England.  He has laid
out seven francs in decorating it with silver and gold, and fitting
it with a silken leash to hang about his shoulder.  The hounds have
been on a pilgrimage to the shrine of Saint Mesmer, or Saint Hubert
in the Ardennes, or some other holy intercessor who has made a
speciality of the health of hunting-dogs.  In the grey dawn the
game was turned and the branch broken by our best piqueur.  A rare
day's hunting lies before us.  Wind a jolly flourish, sound the
bien-aller with all your lungs.  Jacques must stand by, hat in
hand, while the quarry and hound and huntsman sweep across his
field, and a year's sparing and labouring is as though it had not
been.  If he can see the ruin with a good enough grace, who knows
but he may fall in favour with my lord; who knows but his son may
become the last and least among the servants at his lordship's
kennel--one of the two poor varlets who get no wages and sleep at
night among the hounds? {4}

For all that, the forest has been of use to Jacques, not only
warming him with fallen wood, but giving him shelter in days of
sore trouble, when my lord of the chateau, with all his troopers
and trumpets, had been beaten from field after field into some
ultimate fastness, or lay over-seas in an English prison.  In these
dark days, when the watch on the church steeple saw the smoke of
burning villages on the sky-line, or a clump of spears and
fluttering pensions drawing nigh across the plain, these good folk
gat them up, with all their household gods, into the wood, whence,
from some high spur, their timid scouts might overlook the coming
and going of the marauders, and see the harvest ridden down, and
church and cottage go up to heaven all night in flame.  It was but
an unhomely refuge that the woods afforded, where they must abide
all change of weather and keep house with wolves and vipers.  Often
there was none left alive, when they returned, to show the old
divisions of field from field.  And yet, as times went, when the
wolves entered at night into depopulated Paris, and perhaps De Retz
was passing by with a company of demons like himself, even in these
caves and thickets there were glad hearts and grateful prayers.

Once or twice, as I say, in the course of the ages, the forest may
have served the peasant well, but at heart it is a royal forest,
and noble by old associations.  These woods have rung to the horns
of all the kings of France, from Philip Augustus downwards.  They
have seen Saint Louis exercise the dogs he brought with him from
Egypt; Francis I. go a-hunting with ten thousand horses in his
train; and Peter of Russia following his first stag.  And so they
are still haunted for the imagination by royal hunts and
progresses, and peopled with the faces of memorable men of yore.
And this distinction is not only in virtue of the pastime of dead
monarchs.

Great events, great revolutions, great cycles in the affairs of
men, have here left their note, here taken shape in some
significant and dramatic situation.  It was hence that Gruise and
his leaguers led Charles the Ninth a prisoner to Paris.  Here,
booted and spurred, and with all his dogs about him, Napoleon met
the Pope beside a woodland cross.  Here, on his way to Elba not so
long after, he kissed the eagle of the Old Guard, and spoke words
of passionate farewell to his soldiers.  And here, after Waterloo,
rather than yield its ensign to the new power, one of his faithful
regiments burned that memorial of so much toil and glory on the
Grand Master's table, and drank its dust in brandy, as a devout
priest consumes the remnants of the Host.


IN THE SEASON


Close into the edge of the forest, so close that the trees of the
bornage stand pleasantly about the last houses, sits a certain
small and very quiet village.  There is but one street, and that,
not long ago, was a green lane, where the cattle browsed between
the doorsteps.  As you go up this street, drawing ever nearer the
beginning of the wood, you will arrive at last before an inn where
artists lodge.  To the door (for I imagine it to be six o'clock on
some fine summer's even), half a dozen, or maybe half a score, of
people have brought out chairs, and now sit sunning themselves, and
waiting the omnibus from Melun.  If you go on into the court you
will find as many more, some in billiard-room over absinthe and a
match of corks some without over a last cigar and a vermouth.  The
doves coo and flutter from the dovecot; Hortense is drawing water
from the well; and as all the rooms open into the court, you can
see the white-capped cook over the furnace in the kitchen, and some
idle painter, who has stored his canvases and washed his brushes,
jangling a waltz on the crazy, tongue-tied piano in the salle-a-
manger.  'Edmond, encore un vermouth,' cries a man in velveteen,
adding in a tone of apologetic afterthought, 'un double, s'il vous
plait.'  'Where are you working?' asks one in pure white linen from
top to toe.  'At the Carrefour de l'Epine,' returns the other in
corduroy (they are all gaitered, by the way).  'I couldn't do a
thing to it.  I ran out of white.  Where were you?'  'I wasn't
working.  I was looking for motives.'  Here is an outbreak of
jubilation, and a lot of men clustering together about some new-
comer with outstretched hands; perhaps the 'correspondence' has
come in and brought So-and-so from Paris, or perhaps it is only So-
and-so who has walked over from Chailly to dinner.

'A table, Messieurs!' cries M. Siron, bearing through the court the
first tureen of soup.  And immediately the company begins to settle
down about the long tables in the dining-room, framed all round
with sketches of all degrees of merit and demerit.  There's the big
picture of the huntsman winding a horn with a dead boar between his
legs, and his legs--well, his legs in stockings.  And here is the
little picture of a raw mutton-chop, in which Such-a-one knocked a
hole last summer with no worse a missile than a plum from the
dessert.  And under all these works of art so much eating goes
forward, so much drinking, so much jabbering in French and English,
that it would do your heart good merely to peep and listen at the
door.  One man is telling how they all went last year to the fete
at Fleury, and another how well so-and-so would sing of an evening:
and here are a third and fourth making plans for the whole future
of their lives; and there is a fifth imitating a conjurer and
making faces on his clenched fist, surely of all arts the most
difficult and admirable!  A sixth has eaten his fill, lights a
cigarette, and resigns himself to digestion.  A seventh has just
dropped in, and calls for soup.  Number eight, meanwhile, has left
the table, and is once more trampling the poor piano under powerful
and uncertain fingers.

Dinner over, people drop outside to smoke and chat.  Perhaps we go
along to visit our friends at the other end of the village, where
there is always a good welcome and a good talk, and perhaps some
pickled oysters and white wine to close the evening.  Or a dance is
organised in the dining-room, and the piano exhibits all its paces
under manful jockeying, to the light of three or four candles and a
lamp or two, while the waltzers move to and fro upon the wooden
floor, and sober men, who are not given to such light pleasures,
get up on the table or the sideboard, and sit there looking on
approvingly over a pipe and a tumbler of wine.  Or sometimes--
suppose my lady moon looks forth, and the court from out the half-
lit dining-room seems nearly as bright as by day, and the light
picks out the window-panes, and makes a clear shadow under every
vine-leaf on the wall--sometimes a picnic is proposed, and a basket
made ready, and a good procession formed in front of the hotel.
The two trumpeters in honour go before; and as we file down the
long alley, and up through devious footpaths among rocks and pine-
trees, with every here and there a dark passage of shadow, and
every here and there a spacious outlook over moonlit woods, these
two precede us and sound many a jolly flourish as they walk.  We
gather ferns and dry boughs into the cavern, and soon a good blaze
flutters the shadows of the old bandits' haunt, and shows shapely
beards and comely faces and toilettes ranged about the wall.  The
bowl is lit, and the punch is burnt and sent round in scalding
thimblefuls.  So a good hour or two may pass with song and jest.
And then we go home in the moonlit morning, straggling a good deal
among the birch tufts and the boulders, but ever called together
again, as one of our leaders winds his horn.  Perhaps some one of
the party will not heed the summons, but chooses out some by-way of
his own.  As he follows the winding sandy road, he hears the
flourishes grow fainter and fainter in the distance, and die
finally out, and still walks on in the strange coolness and silence
and between the crisp lights and shadows of the moonlit woods,
until suddenly the bell rings out the hour from far-away Chailly,
and he starts to find himself alone.  No surf-bell on forlorn and
perilous shores, no passing knell over the busy market-place, can
speak with a more heavy and disconsolate tongue to human ears.
Each stroke calls up a host of ghostly reverberations in his mind.
And as he stands rooted, it has grown once more so utterly silent
that it seems to him he might hear the church bells ring the hour
out all the world over, not at Chailly only, but in Paris, and away
in outlandish cities, and in the village on the river, where his
childhood passed between the sun and flowers.


IDLE HOURS


The woods by night, in all their uncanny effect, are not rightly to
be understood until you can compare them with the woods by day.
The stillness of the medium, the floor of glittering sand, these
trees that go streaming up like monstrous sea-weeds and waver in
the moving winds like the weeds in submarine currents, all these
set the mind working on the thought of what you may have seen off a
foreland or over the side of a boat, and make you feel like a
diver, down in the quiet water, fathoms below the tumbling,
transitory surface of the sea.  And yet in itself, as I say, the
strangeness of these nocturnal solitudes is not to be felt fully
without the sense of contrast.  You must have risen in the morning
and seen the woods as they are by day, kindled and coloured in the
sun's light; you must have felt the odour of innumerable trees at
even, the unsparing heat along the forest roads, and the coolness
of the groves.

And on the first morning you will doubtless rise betimes.  If you
have not been wakened before by the visit of some adventurous
pigeon, you will be wakened as soon as the sun can reach your
window--for there are no blind or shutters to keep him out--and the
room, with its bare wood floor and bare whitewashed walls, shines
all round you in a sort of glory of reflected lights.  You may doze
a while longer by snatches, or lie awake to study the charcoal men
and dogs and horses with which former occupants have defiled the
partitions:  Thiers, with wily profile; local celebrities, pipe in
hand; or, maybe, a romantic landscape splashed in oil.  Meanwhile
artist after artist drops into the salle-a-manger for coffee, and
then shoulders easel, sunshade, stool, and paint-box, bound into a
fagot, and sets of for what he calls his 'motive.'  And artist
after artist, as he goes out of the village, carries with him a
little following of dogs.  For the dogs, who belong only nominally
to any special master, hang about the gate of the forest all day
long, and whenever any one goes by who hits their fancy, profit by
his escort, and go forth with him to play an hour or two at
hunting.  They would like to be under the trees all day.  But they
cannot go alone.  They require a pretext.  And so they take the
passing artist as an excuse to go into the woods, as they might
take a walking-stick as an excuse to bathe.  With quick ears, long
spines, and bandy legs, or perhaps as tall as a greyhound and with
a bulldog's head, this company of mongrels will trot by your side
all day and come home with you at night, still showing white teeth
and wagging stunted tail.  Their good humour is not to be
exhausted.  You may pelt them with stones if you please, and all
they will do is to give you a wider berth.  If once they come out
with you, to you they will remain faithful, and with you return;
although if you meet them next morning in the street, it is as like
as not they will cut you with a countenance of brass.

The forest--a strange thing for an Englishman--is very destitute of
birds.  This is no country where every patch of wood among the
meadows gibes up an increase of song, and every valley wandered
through by a streamlet rings and reverberates from side to with a
profusion of clear notes.  And this rarity of birds is not to be
regretted on its own account only.  For the insects prosper in
their absence, and become as one of the plagues of Egypt.  Ants
swarm in the hot sand; mosquitos drone their nasal drone; wherever
the sun finds a hole in the roof of the forest, you see a myriad
transparent creatures coming and going in the shaft of light; and
even between-whiles, even where there is no incursion of sun-rays
into the dark arcade of the wood, you are conscious of a continual
drift of insects, an ebb and flow of infinitesimal living things
between the trees.  Nor are insects the only evil creatures that
haunt the forest.  For you may plump into a cave among the rocks,
and find yourself face to face with a wild boar, or see a crooked
viper slither across the road.

Perhaps you may set yourself down in the bay between two spreading
beech-roots with a book on your lap, and be awakened all of a
sudden by a friend:  'I say, just keep where you are, will you?
You make the jolliest motive.'  And you reply:  'Well, I don't
mind, if I may smoke.'  And thereafter the hours go idly by.  Your
friend at the easel labours doggedly a little way off, in the wide
shadow of the tree; and yet farther, across a strait of glaring
sunshine, you see another painter, encamped in the shadow of
another tree, and up to his waist in the fern.  You cannot watch
your own effigy growing out of the white trunk, and the trunk
beginning to stand forth from the rest of the wood, and the whole
picture getting dappled over with the flecks of sun that slip
through the leaves overhead, and, as a wind goes by and sets the
trees a-talking, flicker hither and thither like butterflies of
light.  But you know it is going forward; and, out of emulation
with the painter, get ready your own palette, and lay out the
colour for a woodland scene in words.

Your tree stands in a hollow paved with fern and heather, set in a
basin of low hills, and scattered over with rocks and junipers.
All the open is steeped in pitiless sunlight.  Everything stands
out as though it were cut in cardboard, every colour is strained
into its highest key.  The boulders are some of them upright and
dead like monolithic castles, some of them prone like sleeping
cattle.  The junipers--looking, in their soiled and ragged
mourning, like some funeral procession that has gone seeking the
place of sepulchre three hundred years and more in wind and rain--
are daubed in forcibly against the glowing ferns and heather.
Every tassel of their rusty foliage is defined with pre-Raphaelite
minuteness.  And a sorry figure they make out there in the sun,
like misbegotten yew-trees!  The scene is all pitched in a key of
colour so peculiar, and lit up with such a discharge of violent
sunlight, as a man might live fifty years in England and not see.

Meanwhile at your elbow some one tunes up a song, words of Ronsard
to a pathetic tremulous air, of how the poet loved his mistress
long ago, and pressed on her the flight of time, and told her how
white and quiet the dead lay under the stones, and how the boat
dipped and pitched as the shades embarked for the passionless land.
Yet a little while, sang the poet, and there shall be no more love;
only to sit and remember loves that might have been.  There is a
falling flourish in the air that remains in the memory and comes
back in incongruous places, on the seat of hansoms or in the warm
bed at night, with something of a forest savour.

'You can get up now,' says the painter; 'I'm at the background.'

And so up you get, stretching yourself, and go your way into the
wood, the daylight becoming richer and more golden, and the shadows
stretching farther into the open.  A cool air comes along the
highways, and the scents awaken.  The fir-trees breathe abroad
their ozone.  Out of unknown thickets comes forth the soft, secret,
aromatic odour of the woods, not like a smell of the free heaven,
but as though court ladies, who had known these paths in ages long
gone by, still walked in the summer evenings, and shed from their
brocades a breath of musk or bergamot upon the woodland winds.  One
side of the long avenues is still kindled with the sun, the other
is plunged in transparent shadow.  Over the trees the west begins
to burn like a furnace; and the painters gather up their chattels,
and go down, by avenue or footpath, to the plain.


A PLEASURE-PARTY


As this excursion is a matter of some length, and, moreover, we go
in force, we have set aside our usual vehicle, the pony-cart, and
ordered a large wagonette from Lejosne's.  It has been waiting for
near an hour, while one went to pack a knapsack, and t'other
hurried over his toilette and coffee; but now it is filled from end
to end with merry folk in summer attire, the coachman cracks his
whip, and amid much applause from round the inn door off we rattle
at a spanking trot.  The way lies through the forest, up hill and
down dale, and by beech and pine wood, in the cheerful morning
sunshine.  The English get down at all the ascents and walk on
ahead for exercise; the French are mightily entertained at this,
and keep coyly underneath the tilt.  As we go we carry with us a
pleasant noise of laughter and light speech, and some one will be
always breaking out into a bar or two of opera bouffe.  Before we
get to the Route Ronde here comes Desprez, the colourman from
Fontainebleau, trudging across on his weekly peddle with a case of
merchandise; and it is 'Desprez, leave me some malachite green';
'Desprez, leave me so much canvas'; 'Desprez, leave me this, or
leave me that'; M. Desprez standing the while in the sunlight with
grave face and many salutations.  The next interruption is more
important.  For some time back we have had the sound of cannon in
our ears; and now, a little past Franchard, we find a mounted
trooper holding a led horse, who brings the wagonette to a stand.
The artillery is practising in the Quadrilateral, it appears;
passage along the Route Ronde formally interdicted for the moment.
There is nothing for it but to draw up at the glaring cross-roads
and get down to make fun with the notorious Cocardon, the most
ungainly and ill-bred dog of all the ungainly and ill-bred dogs of
Barbizon, or clamber about the sandy banks.  And meanwhile the
doctor, with sun umbrella, wide Panama, and patriarchal beard, is
busy wheedling and (for aught the rest of us know) bribing the too
facile sentry.  His speech is smooth and dulcet, his manner
dignified and insinuating.  It is not for nothing that the Doctor
has voyaged all the world over, and speaks all languages from
French to Patagonian.  He has not come borne from perilous journeys
to be thwarted by a corporal of horse.  And so we soon see the
soldier's mouth relax, and his shoulders imitate a relenting heart.
'En voiture, Messieurs, Mesdames,' sings the Doctor; and on we go
again at a good round pace, for black care follows hard after us,
and discretion prevails not a little over valour in some timorous
spirits of the party.  At any moment we may meet the sergeant, who
will send us back.  At any moment we may encounter a flying shell,
which will send us somewhere farther off than Grez.

Grez--for that is our destination--has been highly recommended for
its beauty.  'Il y a de l'eau,' people have said, with an emphasis,
as if that settled the question, which, for a French mind, I am
rather led to think it does.  And Grez, when we get there, is
indeed a place worthy of some praise.  It lies out of the forest, a
cluster of houses, with an old bridge, an old castle in ruin, and a
quaint old church.  The inn garden descends in terraces to the
river; stable-yard, kailyard, orchard, and a space of lawn, fringed
with rushes and embellished with a green arbour.  On the opposite
bank there is a reach of English-looking plain, set thickly with
willows and poplars.  And between the two lies the river, clear and
deep, and full of reeds and floating lilies.  Water-plants cluster
about the starlings of the long low bridge, and stand half-way up
upon the piers in green luxuriance.  They catch the dipped oar with
long antennae, and chequer the slimy bottom with the shadow of
their leaves.  And the river wanders and thither hither among the
islets, and is smothered and broken up by the reeds, like an old
building in the lithe, hardy arms of the climbing ivy.  You may
watch the box where the good man of the inn keeps fish alive for
his kitchen, one oily ripple following another over the top of the
yellow deal.  And you can hear a splashing and a prattle of voices
from the shed under the old kirk, where the village women wash and
wash all day among the fish and water-lilies.  It seems as if linen
washed there should be specially cool and sweet.

We have come here for the river.  And no sooner have we all bathed
than we board the two shallops and push off gaily, and go gliding
under the trees and gathering a great treasure of water-lilies.
Some one sings; some trail their hands in the cool water; some lean
over the gunwale to see the image of the tall poplars far below,
and the shadow of the boat, with the balanced oars and their own
head protruded, glide smoothly over the yellow floor of the stream.
At last, the day declining--all silent and happy, and up to the
knees in the wet lilies--we punt slowly back again to the landing-
place beside the bridge.  There is a wish for solitude on all.  One
hides himself in the arbour with a cigarette; another goes a walk
in the country with Cocardon; a third inspects the church.  And it
is not till dinner is on the table, and the inn's best wine goes
round from glass to glass, that we begin to throw off the restraint
and fuse once more into a jolly fellowship.

Half the party are to return to-night with the wagonette; and some
of the others, loath to break up company, will go with them a bit
of the way and drink a stirrup-cup at Marlotte.  It is dark in the
wagonette, and not so merry as it might have been.  The coachman
loses the road.  So-and-so tries to light fireworks with the most
indifferent success.  Some sing, but the rest are too weary to
applaud; and it seems as if the festival were fairly at an end -

'Nous avons fait la noce,
Rentrons a nos foyers!'

And such is the burthen, even after we have come to Marlotte and
taken our places in the court at Mother Antonine's.  There is punch
on the long table out in the open air, where the guests dine in
summer weather.  The candles flare in the night wind, and the faces
round the punch are lit up, with shifting emphasis, against a
background of complete and solid darkness.  It is all picturesque
enough; but the fact is, we are aweary.  We yawn; we are out of the
vein; we have made the wedding, as the song says, and now, for
pleasure's sake, let's make an end on't.  When here comes striding
into the court, booted to mid-thigh, spurred and splashed, in a
jacket of green cord, the great, famous, and redoubtable Blank; and
in a moment the fire kindles again, and the night is witness of our
laughter as he imitates Spaniards, Germans, Englishmen, picture-
dealers, all eccentric ways of speaking and thinking, with a
possession, a fury, a strain of mind and voice, that would rather
suggest a nervous crisis than a desire to please.  We are as merry
as ever when the trap sets forth again, and say farewell noisily to
all the good folk going farther.  Then, as we are far enough from
thoughts of sleep, we visit Blank in his quaint house, and sit an
hour or so in a great tapestried chamber, laid with furs, littered
with sleeping hounds, and lit up, in fantastic shadow and shine, by
a wood fire in a mediaeval chimney.  And then we plod back through
the darkness to the inn beside the river.