We end our afternoon by a long drive through the fertile plain of Orange, all the brighter for the severeness of its setting, for the spires and hedges of cypress, for the gaunt dim blue of the distant mountains. The spring is luxuriant and ample here. The hedges toss their fragrant boughs of may: the Japanese peonies are pink in every garden, the quince-orchards seem a bower of tiny roses, the purple flags are out by all the watercourses: but the prettiest sight of all is on the grass. Even in Italy I have never seen such hay-meadows, with their great golden trails of buttercups, their sheets of snow-white narcissus, springing innumerable and very tall above the grass. There are little children and boys, and tall young girls, grown women and men of all ages, in the fields gathering great posies of the delicious flowers. Never have I seen so bright a picture of the sheer joy of living, the mere gladness of the spring’s revival. It seems to us that we have driven by some happy byway into the Golden Age, into some idyl of old Greece. III Here the towns are set as close together as the jewels in a crown. We have scarcely left Orange before we see, beyond the green belt of the Rhone, the mediæval outline of the Palace of the Popes. _L’Ile Sonnante_, as Rabelais called it, rises out of the plain and the water like an island indeed, much as our own little Rye stands up out of the Sussex marshes. With its steeples and convents, its towers and buttresses, massed round the tremendous fortress on the central rock, girdled by an outer circle of crenelated ramparts, this fair town of Avignon appears the very sanctuary of the Middle Ages. The great interest of Avignon is that it appears a town of one time--a flower of the fourteenth century still full of life and vigour. The tower of Philippe le Bel at Villeneuve dates from 1307; the great Palace of the Popes, the fortifications of the town, with their battlements and machicolations, and the vast round yellow fortress of St. André, massive against its background of olive-coloured hills--all these, and many smaller relics, belong to the second half of the fourteenth century. Even here in the South, few cities can show so many or such pure examples of the military architecture of the time. The city wall of Avignon, since in part destroyed, had, when I saw it, a circumference of about fifteen thousand [Illustration: THE PALACE OF THE POPES AT AVIGNON]