High up before the altar, directly above the manger in which the Christ-Child was lying, would be the glittering _bello estello_; and making their homage before the manger would be the Kings whom it had guided thither from the East: old white-bearded King Melchior with his gift of incense; gallant young King Gaspard with his gift of treasure; black King Balthazar the Moor with his gift of myrrh. How reverently we would gaze on them, and how we would admire the brave pages who carried the trains of their long mantles, and the hump-backed camels whose heads towered high above Saint Mary and Saint Joseph and the ox and the ass. Yes, there they were at last--the Kings! Many and many a time in the after years have I gone a-walking on the Arles road at nightfall on the Eve of the Kings. It is the same--but not the same. The sun, over beyond the Rhone, is dipping toward the Cevennes; the leafless trees are red in the low sun-rays; across the fields stretch the black lines of cypress; even the old man, as long ago, is scratching in the hedge by the roadside for snails. And when darkness comes quickly, with the sun's setting, the owls hoot as of old. But in the radiant glory of the sunset I no longer see the dazzle and the splendour of the Kings! "Which way went they, the Kings?" "Behind the mountains!" VIII In the morning of the day preceding Christmas a lurking, yet ill-repressed, excitement pervaded the Chateau and all its dependencies. In the case of the Vidame and Mise Fougueiroun the excitement did not even lurk: it blazed forth so openly that they were as a brace of comets--bustling violently through our universe and dragging into their erratic wakes, away from normal orbits, the whole planetary system of the household and all the haply intrusive stars.