Then I turned to the cemetery. The little pathways were muddy beneath the leafless trees. Bead crosses and wreaths and a few stunted chrysanthemums decorated the wet graves. All seasons are the same to the dead. I stood by a breach in the wall near the grave of “_Charles Carron, musicien, souvenir d’un camarade, 31 août, 1914_,” looking out toward the forest of Vitrimont. Its autumn garb was soft, discreet, and lovely; more jasper and amethyst and Chrysoprase and cornelian fields rolled gently in between it and me. There was the band of yellow like a Greek border to a garment in the western sky—only that and nothing more, yet some beauty and sadness chained me to the spot. Quail and woodcock, gray pheasant and larks, were flying about, and some strongly marked black-and-white magpies were pecking at something in the nearest field. I asked myself again, “What is it that stamps Lorraine with such beauty?” General de Buyer told me that when Pierre Loti came to Vitrimont he said, “_C’est trop vert_,” and perhaps, after Stamboul and Egypt and the Grecian Isles, it would seem too green. But I saw, returning there in autumn, that the soul of Lorraine, _l’élégante et douleureuse_, is like unto tarnished silver, with its grays, yellows, browns, and purples; that soul that has suffered, hoped through the generations, whose abiding-places have been devastated and rebuilt through the centuries. And I knew that one must see it in autumn, beneath the wasteful splendors of gray clouds, with their hints of color, red, brown, yellow, and purple, or with sky and rain melting into one, curtaining the brown, mysterious earth—and, in between, the beat of the human heart. It all seemed to show itself through some dissolving light of ages. Those secular beeches, that I had first seen in their tenderest green, had become a brilliant yellow, and were turned to the south. The great bronze oaks looked to the north, obeying laws as inviolable as those of the human beings passing beneath them. In all these forests round about Vitrimont, Parroy, and Mondon the legendary lords of the country hunted; the roads of Gaul disappeared under the great Roman highways which traversed Lorraine from Langres to Trèves, from Toul to Metz, and again from Langres to Strasburg. The name Lunéville emerges out of the night of the tenth century in the person of Étienne, Bishop of Toul, successor of St.-Gérard, and Folmar I, Count of Lunéville, was married to Sparhilde, descended from Charlemagne. (To this day I notice that almost any one who respects himself in these parts talks quite casually of being descended from Charlemagne, or Charles the Bald, or René the Victorious, as a Boston man might of the Pilgrim Fathers.) Folmar’s hunting-lodge was by the muddy Vesouze, over which one passes to get from Lunéville to Vitrimont. In time it was transformed into a château, and around it grew a village, which in turn became a fortified town, then the capital of Léopold and Stanislas.