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 devoutpriest 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 spaciousoutlook 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 romanticlandscape 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