James tries to make a serious hardship of his "exile" at Bar. But he might, without much trouble, have fixed upon a very much worse spot. Bar was not in his day the important town that it had been. The resident dukes, with their courts and knighthood, their tourneys and banquets, and all the pageantry of the days of early chivalry, had passed away. The famous University of de Tholozan, highly praised by Jodocus Sincerus, had likewise disappeared. Nor was the town anything like as accessible as it is now. There was no railway leading to it, no Rhine-Marne Canal--beautifying the scene wherever it passes--to carry life and business into the place. The roads were simply execrable. The surrounding woods swarmed with brigands, outlaws, and other bad characters, whom special _chasse-coquins_ were retained to keep in awe. Whenever "His Majesty" moved from one place to another, the forest-roads had to be literally lined with troops to ensure his safety. But all this was no drawback peculiar to Bar. The entire duchy of Lorraine was suffering from the same trouble--the after-effect of French ravages and French occupation. Leave that out of account, and Bar must have been attractive enough. Its situation is remarkably picturesque. The castle-hill rises up steeply, all but isolated from the surrounding heights, above the smiling valley of the Ornain, with delightfully green and tempting side-valleys curling around it, like natural fosses, on either side. The view of the long, bright green stretch of meadows bordering the river; the laughing gardens, full of flowers and shrubs; the luxuriant fruit-trees and hedges; the half-archaic-looking streets, venerable with their churches and monasteries, and the eleven old turreted gates, as they were then; the soft, rounded _côtes_, covered with clustering vines, but looking at a distance as if carpeted with velvety lawn; the picturesque range of hills on the opposite bank, contoured into a telling sky-line; the dark forests of richly varied foliage, and the charming "hangers" which drop down gracefully here and there, with pleasingly effective irregularity, into the plain; the pretty little cottage plots, bright with flowers, shady with overhanging trees, which then as now lined that useful _Canal Urbain_; and the peculiarly engaging perspective of the landscape spreading out right and left--all this combines to form a truly fascinating picture. The view of the castle-hill from below is no less pleasing. In James's day the hill was still crowned with the old historic castle, built in the tenth century, but embodying in its masonry the remains of the much more ancient structure in which Childéric I. had, like the Stuart prince, found a welcome refuge--the castle in which Francis of Guise was born, who drove us out of Calais--the castle in which Mary Queen of Scots, bright with youthful beauty, and radiant with happiness, delighted with her cheering presence the gay Court of her cousin and