And, again, we would teach our peasants the benefits of union. There is a great future for agricultural syndicates, buying and selling on co-operative terms, and distributing among their members the proper complement of agricultural machines; by their aid the small landowner of a few acres may be enabled to sustain the competition of the large model-farms; and perhaps, under new conditions, the agriculture of the rural districts may revive, surpassing those golden years between 1830 and 1880. But the season of adversity has not been barren. Even the farmer cannot live by bread alone; and the lean years that end the nineteenth century have witnessed the moral and mental regeneration of the French peasant. Whatever be his destiny, he is now that “man of independent mind” whom Burns proclaimed the equal of any man in any class. THE FORESTS OF THE OISE THE FORESTS OF THE OISE PART I 1893 I “The prettiest April still wears a wreath of frost.” So runs an old French proverb, which is not always true. At least, in that bygone year of 1893 by the end of April the heat was as parched as at midsummer; roses and strawberries were hawked through the streets of Paris; the dust was a moving sepulchre, and the sunshine a burden. We longed for a plunge into the great forests of the north. Oh for the cool grass and the deep glades of woods that have been woods for these two thousand years! ’Tis something to feel one’s self in a Gaulish forest--though I can remember older trees in Warwickshire. But, in the forests of the Oise, from father to son, the succession is imposing, and the delicate silver birches of Chantilly spring from ancestors who may have shadowed Pharamond. At Chantilly the train put us down on the edge of the forest. I always wish that we had stayed there, in the little station inn, where the air is still sweet with may and lilies. But we drove on to the town, with its neat, expensive hotels, its rows of training-stables, and parched, oblong racecourse. Chantilly is a true French village, with its one endless winding street, pearl-grey, with a castle at the end of it. From almost any point of it you see, beyond the houses, a glint of waters and hear a rustle of woods. There is an indescribable airy lightness about the place, about the fresh fine air, the loose sand of the soil, the thin green boughs of silver birch and hornbeam, the smooth-trunked beechen glades that are never allowed to grow into great forest trees. It was with an effort of the imagination that we realized the ancient stock of this slim nestling underwood where nothing looks older than Louis Philippe. The Sylvanectes, the Gaulish foresters, have so entirely disappeared. II