rather worse, for when the ladies woke up they didn't know her. She was very shy, spent a wretched ten minutes before they woke, and was too nervous to name herself. She was half crying when her husband came to the rescue. We left the next morning early, as W. had people coming to him in the afternoon. I enjoyed my visit thoroughly, and told them afterward of my misgivings and doubts as to how I should get along with strangers for two or three days. I think they had rather the same feeling. They were very old friends of my husband's, and though they received me charmingly from the first, it brought a foreign and new element into their circle. * * * * * Another interesting old château, most picturesque, with towers, moat, and drawbridge, is Lorrey-le-Bocage, belonging to the Comte de S. It stands very well, in a broad moat--the water clear and rippling and finishing in a pretty little stream that runs off through the meadows. The place is beautifully kept--gardens, lawns, courts, in perfect order. It has no particular _historic_ interest for the family, having been bought by the parents of the present owner. I was there, the first time, in very hot weather, the 14th of July (the French National fête commemorating the fall of the Bastille). I went for a stroll in the park the morning after I arrived, but I collapsed under a big tree at once--hadn't the energy to move. Everything looked so hot and not a breath of air anywhere. The moat looked glazed--so absolutely still under the bright summer sun--big flies were buzzing and skimming over the surface, and the flowers and plants were drooping in their beds. Inside it was delightful, the walls so thick that neither heat nor cold could penetrate. The house is charming. The big drawing-room--where we always sat--was a large, bright room with windows on each side and lovely views over park and gardens; and all sorts of family portraits and souvenirs dating from Louis XV to the Comte de Paris. The men of the family--all ardent Royalists--have been, for generations, distinguished as soldiers and statesmen. One of them--a son of the famous Maréchal de S, brought up in the last years of the reign of Louis XV--carried his youthful ardour and dreams of liberty to America and took part, as did so many of the young French nobles, in the great struggle for independence that was being fought out on the other side of the Atlantic. Soon after his return to France he was named Ambassador to Russia to the court of Catherine II, and was supposed to have been very much in the good graces of that very pleasure-loving sovereign. He accompanied her on her famous trip to the Crimea, arranged for her by her minister and favourite, Potemkin--when fairy villages, with happy populations singing and dancing, sprang up in the road wherever she passed as if by magic--quite dispelling her ideas of the poverty and oppression of some of her subjects.