It is impossible to conjecture why some country, some place, some woman, should make that indescribable appeal which lays a hand on the latch of those gates leading to that world of imagination which exists in most of us far, far below the placid, shallow waters of conventionalism. It is impossible to conjecture when or where the voice and the call will sound in our ears. The man who hears it will recognise what it means, but will in no way be able to account for it. He will only know with what infinite satisfaction he is sensible of the touch which enables him to "slip through the magic gates," as a great friend once expressed it, into the world of Idealism, of Imagination. True, the pleasure, the satisfaction, is elusive. He can lay no hand upon those wonderful moments which come thus to him. Even before he is aware that they have begun, he is conscious that they are already slipping out of his grasp. What play has ever shown this more clearly than Maeterlinck's "Blue Bird"? Though the children go from glory to glory of lustrous imagination, though they can go back to the land of Old Memories, to the land of the Future, yet they cannot stay there. Though they see and rejoice to the full in the "Blue Bird," the spirit of Happiness, yet that one soft stroking of its feathers is all that is possible before it flies away. For every Ideal is winged: every Conception of Happiness but a passing vision. We have but to attempt to grasp them to find their elusiveness is a fact from which we cannot get away. For me, the France about which I have written in the following pages is a country which calls to me from the world of my ideals, from the world of my imagination. From across the seas that call stirs me and thrills me indescribably. It is not the France of the Parisian; it is not the France of the automobilist; it is not the France of the Cook's tourist. It is the France upon whose shores one steps at once into _the land of many ideals_. I should like here to thank three friends, Messieurs Henri Guillier, Goulon, and E. G. Sieveking, who have most kindly given me permission to print their photographs of the part of France through which I travelled, and more than all, the greatest friend of all, who alone made the journey possible. I. Giberne Sieveking. Autumn Impressions of the Gironde CHAPTER I "Mails first!" shouted the captain from the upper deck, as the steamer from Newhaven brought up alongside the landing stage at Dieppe, and the eager flow of the tide of passengers, anxious to forget on dry land how roughly the "cradle of the deep" had lately rocked them, was stayed.