The Hôtel de Ville might, at first sight, owing to restoration, be thought a modern building. It has a Renaissance façade built between 1520 and 1525, and the bas-reliefs with which it is covered show the arms of Dunois and Longueville, the Salamander of François I., and the fleur-de-lis. The seventeenth-century tapestries to be seen inside came from the choir of the abbey church. Other features of the town are the Tour de l’Horloge, used as a prison before the sixteenth century; the Tour St. Firmin of the church destroyed during the Revolution; and the portions of the twelfth-century ramparts with the ruined Porte Travers. In 1428 the English captured Beaugency, but Jeanne d’Arc recovered it in the following year. Crossing the bridge, with its massive old buttresses, and turning at once to the right, one keeps near the river through the village of St. Laurent-des-Eaux, with a statue of Jeanne d’Arc, and houses with the mossiest of roofs and quaint little dormers. There is a quality in the air of this part of the Loire conducive to the growth of parasitic vegetation, for every roof and wall, and every tree, is enriched with luxuriant moss or splashes of silvery and orange lichen. The road continues through the same flat country, with low, scrubby forest to the left, and touches the river again at Nouan-sur-Loire, another old village rich in soft greens and greys. A house on the left is conspicuous for its quaintness, and several of the cottages have heart-shaped holes cut in the shutters of the windows. [Illustration: No. 6 ORLEANS TO TOURS.] Just beyond Nouan the road to the Château de Chambord goes to the left at a fork, and in a few minutes one passes through a gate in the seven-league stone wall that surrounds the park, and a straight avenue through the low trees leads to the great castle. CHÂTEAU DE CHAMBORD There is no appearance of age in the immense pile of white stone that gleams in the sunshine under its astonishingly overweighted roofs, and by many who have come expecting something altogether different, the bitterest disappointment has been expressed.