It is not every French provincial town that can rival Nemours in one respect: beside one of the new and dreadful houses its owner has seen fit to erect a kind of ruin, an imitation in miniature of an old fortified castle, with simulated remains of battlements, sham doors of the middle ages, barred windows, etc. He has even taken the trouble to have a real bullet embedded in the wall of his precious ruin--a bullet fired, it is said, by the Prussians during their campaign in France! Above the bullet, the date of the memorable event is placed in large letters--1814! The bullet looks not unlike a tennis-ball; the ruin itself seems to be made of papier-mâché; and, with the new house by the side of the sham ruin, the _tout ensemble_ of this delightful little property is a triumph of the grotesque. It is certain that it is not this new and expensive quarter which lends to Nemours its strange charm, any more than in other French towns, or in Paris itself, where the modern attempts at architecture are veritable eyesores. After all, each man enjoys life in his own way; and so M. Chevillard, a retired lawyer, who does not own any ruins, and who, strange to say, does not desire any, has a passion of an entirely different kind. M. Chevillard’s passion is fishing. He has chosen Nemours as his abiding-place simply because its three watercourses abound in pike and roach; but that fact does not imply that M. Chevillard catches many of them. Nevertheless, every day we may see him seated placidly on his camp-stool, on the bank of the river, near the bridge, wearing an enormous straw hat, which the suns of many summers have tanned a rich golden-brown, the shade of well-toasted bread. He holds a fishing-rod in his hand; the line falls into the water, and its tiny red cork moves gently to and fro with the current. When this red cork drifts toward the dark shadows under the bridge, M. Chevillard jerks his rod up quickly, and we hear the line whistle in the air; then, in the twinkling of an eye, the cork falls back on the surface of the water, and the game begins again; and so it goes on all day and every day. The strange thing is, however, that nearly every one in Nemours has this same passion for fishing. All along the river, the canal, and the smaller stream, we see rows of yellow hats, and, under them, any number of kindly men and women of all ages, who sit calmly from morning till night, watching their lines.