schools and universities, the dim and discredited philosophies, the decaying art and the vanished ideals of Fécamp and Reims, of Bruges and Louvain, of Aix and Trèves and Cologne. And now the Frankenstein monster gets him to his perfect work, and through the coal-fields and over the forges and factories, where he was fashioned, spreads death, devastation, and ruin that, nevertheless (and here the mystery and the wonder increase), may yet bring redemption, release, and restoration. What has been in the immediate past needs no description: Crefeld and Lille are only Manchester and Pittsburgh, and their familiarity is sufficient to itself. What is now is equally common to all, and Louvain, Arras, and Reims in their blood-stained ruin are a part of the common consciousness. Meanwhile there were, and for the moment are, other cities and other regions, forgotten or endured, that are all Charleroi is not, or Crefeld or Maubeuge, and they are well worth a study, partly for what they are, partly for what they signify, partly for what they may forecast for a future beyond the present cataclysm. There is hardly a more absorbingly interesting portion of France, historically, artistically, or picturesquely, than that wonderful quadrilateral, Compiègne-Noyon-Laon-Soissons, with its three great cathedrals; its finest castle ruin in France--Coucy, the pride of Enguerrand III--its fine old towns, as Laon and Noyon, with their groves and terraced paths; its great Forest of Compiègne; and only a few miles away on one hand or the other, châteaux such as Coucy and Ham, battle-fields of the significance of Crécy. It is all fought over now and may be again; no one knows how much is left, or may be left by and by, but it was a fair land, with many traces of a more spacious and balanced past, not in its great churches alone but as well in its quiet villages and its fine grey houses in old cities. A frontier, in a way, for already the creeping desolation of industrialism had reached close, working always down from the North of coal and iron, already absorbing St. Quentin and involving its ancient architecture in smoke and traffic, blotting out its streets of gabled houses, and turning it into a typical manufacturing centre--this, that was once the dowry of Mary Stuart.