One other day, too, I remember. It was warmer; a thaw had set in; a light white mist enveloped everything. We walked on the common as in a world of cotton-wool. Suddenly, a few feet away, a pack of hounds, in full cry, broke out of the moist damp mist; we saw them for a yard or two, and then the fog engulphed them anew. The bright coats of the _piqueurs_, in a vision of horses, kept appearing and disappearing. It was the Duke of Chartres’ meet. Chantilly is a cheerful place in winter. The Orleans princes, the Barons de Rothschild, with a bevy of local nobility and gentry, are bent on the pleasures of the chase. It is a land of races, too. In many a corner of the woods you may come upon a set of training stables with, hard by, a queer little sham-Gothic villa, which looks as if it came from Leamington, emblazoned with its English name--Rose Cottage or Ivy Lodge. In every lane you come across the pale, stunted English jockeys, pacing their thoroughbreds. More than once as they rode by, I saw the stalwart peasants in their blouses glance up with a jest from their work at the saw-mill or the woodpile, half contemptuous of the jockeys’ wizened youth, half content that their money should enrich the country-side. And I thought of that long-forgotten France where, for so many decades, the English lads rode by, slim and haughty, and the French peasants chuckled “_Levez votre queue, levez!_” being persuaded that the English had tails like monkeys, in those sad old times of the Hundred Years’ War. On the fourth day the sun rose dazzling. We walked in the _taillis_ where the wood-cutters were hard at work. The forest of Chantilly is almost all planted in _taillis composé_ with hornbeam, elm, and oak--three species which, however often you may fell them, will rise again from the roots, apparently immortal. Each tree in the coppice as it reaches thirty years is marked for the axe, with the exception of a reserve, drawn from the finest subjects, which is permitted to fulfil its natural growth, and affords a permanent covert for the rest. Such is a _taillis composé_ or _taillis sous futaie_--perhaps the most profitable crop that can be drawn from a soil too stiff or too light for the ordinary purposes of agriculture. The hornbeam and the beech are the best of all woods for burning; the oak is their rival, and commands several markets as ship-timber, building-wood, cabinetmaker’s oak, props for mines, or logs for burning. The leaves, too, are a source of profit; for dead leaves in France serve almost all the purposes of straw, and stuff a mattress, or litter a stable, or manure the kitchen garden.