for the hungry wayfarer?—they loved to take their coffee beneath the awning of a café on the shady side of the great, sleepy square, and absorb the sleepy, sunny, prosperous spirit of the place; the unpainted bandstand in the centre, the low-lying houses with sleepy little shops and cafés—Heavens! how many cafés!—around it, the modern, model-built Hôtel de Ville, the fine avenue of plane trees without which no Grande Place in France could exist, and, above the roofs of the houses, the weather-beaten, crumbling Gothic tower of the church surmounted by its extinguisher-shaped leaden belfry alive with vivid yellows and olives. And then the road again past the rapidly becoming familiar objects; the slow ox-carts; the herd of wayside goats in charge of a dirty, tow-headed child; the squad of canvas-suited soldiers; the great lumbering waggons drawn by a string of three gaudily and elaborately yoked horses, the driver fast asleep on the top of his mountainous load; the mongrel dogs that sought, and happily found not, euthanasia beneath the wheels of the modern car of Juggernaut; the sober-vested peasant women bending beneath their burdens with the calm unexpressive faces of caryatides grown old and withered. Towards the late afternoon was reached the larger town where they would halt for the night: first came the eternal, but grateful, outer boulevard cool with foliage, running between newly built, perky houses and shops and then leading into the heart of the older city, grey, narrow-streeted, picturesque. As the automobile clattered through the great gateway of the hotel into the paved courtyard, out came the decent landlord and smiling landlady, welcomed their guests, summoned unshaven men in green-baize aprons—who, at dinner, were to appear in the decorous garb of waiters, and in the morning, by a subtle modification of costume (dingy white aprons instead of green-baize) were to do uncomplaining work as housemaids—to take down the luggage, and showed the travellers to their clean, bare rooms. After the summary removal of the journey’s dust came the delicious saunter through the strange old town; the stimulus of the sudden burst into view of the west front of a cathedral, with its deeply recessed and sculptured doorways, and its great, flamboyant window struck by the westering sun; the quick, indrawn breath of delight when, in a narrow, evil-smelling, cobble-paved street, they came unexpectedly upon some marvel of an early Renaissance façade, with its refined riot of ornament, its unerring proportions, its laughing dignity—laughing all the more and with all the more dignity, as became its mocking, aristocratic soul, because the ground floor was given up to a dingy tinsmith and its upper storeys to the same class of easy-going, slatternly folk who sat at the windows of the other unconsidered houses in the sallow and homely street; the gay relief of emerging from such unsavoury and foot-massacring by-ways into the quarter of the town on