=Montargis.=--An old and historic town; gateway of château, two towers of town walls, and interesting church with twelfth-century nave, and a fine choir of Transitional Gothic and Renaissance. =Souppes.=--A village with a twelfth-century church. =Nemours.=--A small town on the River Loing; picturesque castle, containing a museum; church with thirteenth-century tower, and the rest sixteenth to seventeenth century. =Fontainebleau.=--A small town, which has grown up on one side of the huge Palace of Fontainebleau, built by François I. and succeeding Kings. Briare is the Roman _Brivodurum_, but it is now a quiet, uninteresting little town where buttons are manufactured. After passing through the old-fashioned village of La Boussière, one turns to the left towards the château, at a corner where a board indicates the ‘Route de Paris.’ The yellow-coloured road, with a fine surface, goes on through a well-wooded country to Nogent-sur-Vernisson, a village without interest, and soon afterwards Mormant, a hamlet with a small Romanesque church. MONTARGIS This historic town has, unfortunately, only preserved a gateway of its twelfth-century château, at one time called _le Berceau des Enfants de France_, owing to the French queens coming thither, before the building of Fontainebleau, when they were about to become mothers. Two circular towers of the medieval fortifications are the only relics of the walls that resisted the English army under the Earl of Warwick during the Hundred Years’ War. The church has a fine twelfth-century nave, an ornate west end, and an exceedingly graceful and unusually designed choir, built between 1540 and 1618. The tall pillars of the ambulatory are without capitals, and they support roofs of equal height above the choir and the ambulatory. Interior and exterior show the change from the Gothic to the Classic style. The long canal extending from Briare to the Loing passes through Montargis, which was at one time surrounded by marshy country, now drained and cultivated. On leaving the town one passes a statue of Mirabeau, and, after crossing three bridges, the road to Fontainebleau turns sharply to the left past the goods entrance of the railway-station, and then keeps to the western side of the fairly extensive forest of Montargis. [Illustration: No. 24. BRIARE TO MELUN.] Mistletoe grows luxuriantly in this district, and all the way from Moulins the trees are tufted with the curious parasitic plant, which English folk buy from the French in huge quantities as each Christmas festival approaches. At the hamlet of Fontenay one goes to the right at the fork, and the road continues through a scattered forest, with prodigious quantities of mistletoe, and at a point 13½ kilometres from Nemours there is a _caniveau_ in the middle of the village.