valleys, its pretty hills all clothed with oats, their round heads delicately outlined against the soft horizon, its great forests of Loches and Amboise, its rambling lanes sunk deep between two rows of pollard willows, its great, straight, white high-roads that the aspen flecks with shadow, and above all from that indescribable grace in the lie of the land which satisfies the eye with scant diversity. Arthur Young may declare it “a dead, flat, unpleasant country--a level of burnt russet meadow,” and affirm the landscape to be “more uninteresting than I could have thought it possible for the vicinity of a great river to be.” We will dare to differ. With Montaigne, we will cry shame on the Highlander, whose eye, too accustomed to his lochs and heather, fails to appreciate the melting beauty of Touraine. With Gilbert White, we’ll declare that the rounded forms of a chalk country make it seem more alive and breathing, as it were, than any other. For one season of the year at least, Touraine is beautiful! VII The kings of France always thought so. Their castles lie all round. Lovely Amboise, on the Loire, still belongs to the family of Bourbon-Orleans; but the Republic holds what time has left of Loches, so lordly throned above the Indre, with Blois, and the remains of Plessis. Beautiful Chenonceaux, built across the Cher, has lately been sold to a millionnaire from Cuba. Other foreigners last year settled at Azay-le-Rideau, the fairest, to my thinking, of all the so-called castles of the Loire; for there the Indre seems to eddy round the deserted palace of the Sleeping Beauty. The huge feudal pile which dominates the Loire at Langeais belongs to a Protestant banker from the Havre. Villandry, Moncontour, have been purchased by wealthy families whose coat-of-arms was unknown a hundred years ago. Luynes alone still belongs to the ancient ducal house which bears its name. All of these castles, and a hundred smaller ones, down to our small Commanderie, or the toy-castle of La Carte, near Ballan, have a grace and a dignity of their own, untouched by their change of fortunes. Fallen from their antique state, they appear to own the power of ennobling their possessors. And as the sea-shell models to its form the wandering fish that dwells in it by choice, so these old houses, representing an ideal annihilated by frequent revolutions, have silently refashioned the sort of aristocracy for which they were created. Their ancient walls can find no great change between the present and the past. To make the resemblance all the closer, there has arisen during the last few years in France, especially since the Dreyfus trial, a semblance of civil strife, and, as it were, a shadow of those wars of religion with which these old stones are so familiar. And if as yet no Huguenot gentlemen dangle anew from the iron balconies of Amboise, it is perhaps from no want of a will to string them there on the part of their orthodox neighbours.