Senlis was the capital of our friends the Sylvanectes. Hence stretched on either hand the vast forests which even to-day are still considerable in a score of relics--the woods of Chantilly, Lys, Coye, Ermenonville, Hallatte, Compiègne, Villers-Cotterets, etc., but which in Gallo-Roman times were still one vast united breadth of forest. To-day, all round Senlis the lands are cleared, and the nearest woods, north or south, are some six miles away. We rumbled regretfully down the hill, out towards the windy plains of Valois, windiest plains that ever were; bleak champaigns where the sough and rushing of the wind sounds louder than at sea. The forests of this northern plain are beautiful. O woods of Chantilly! O birchen glades of Coye! O deep and solemn vales of Compiègne, spinnies of Hallatte, and wavy pine-knolls of Villers-Cotterets, are ye not as a collar of green emeralds upon the breast of Mother Earth? But we must admit that, shorn of their trees, the plains of Oise have not the grandeur, the ample solemn roll, of the plains of Seine-et-Marne. ’Tis a lean, chill, flat, and as it were an angular sort of beauty; like some thin thirteenth-century saint, divinely graceful in her robes of verdure; more graceful beneath those plenteous folds than her better nourished sisters. But never choose her for your model of Venus Anadyomene. Leave her that imperial cloak of woods and forests. We pass by fields of sun-smitten, withered pasture; by stretches of sad precocious corn, already in ear on its scanty span-high stems of green; by quarries and hamlets, into the deep wood of Hallatte; then forth again by more fields, ever bleaker, ever higher, till somehow suddenly we find ourselves on the steep brow of a down (they call it a mountain here, la Montagne de la Verberie), with below us, half seen through the poplar screens of the precipitous hill-side, a lovely blue expanse of country with the Oise lying across it like a scimitar of silver. Far away beyond the bridge, beyond the village in its meadows, depths of forest, blue and ever bluer, make an azure background that reaches out to Compiègne.