We wander at random about the little episcopal city: it is charming, tortuous and taciturn, with its moss-covered pavements, its deserted alleys, its flowering orchards, its shadowed promenades, its ancient houses. We discover at every step houses of earlier days which the barbarism of the men of the present time has spared: here turrets, spiral staircases, doors surmounted by old escutcheons, long half-grotesque gargoyles, mullioned windows, evoke the refined elegance of the fifteenth century; yonder, a wall decorated with pilasters and medallions, or a noble brick and stone crow-stepped façade, witness the opulence of the citizenry at the time of the second Renaissance; there are admirable remains of hospitals of the thirteenth century; heavy Tuscan porches stand before beautiful hôtels of the eighteenth: and all this rich and varied architecture is an excellent commentary on the words of Jean de Jandun, the historian of Senlis: "To be at Senlis is to dwell in magnificent homes, whose vigorous walls are built, not of fragile plaster, but of the hardest and most selected stone, placed with an industrious skill, and whose cellars, surrounded by solid constructions of stone, so cool the wines during the summer season, thanks to the degree of their freshness, that the throat and the stomach of drinkers thereby experience a supreme delight." (Note 5.) To the charm of the spectacle is added the charm of ancient names: the sinuous streets have retained their antique appellations. (How wise is Senlis to maintain these strange words, carved in the stone, at the corners of its streets, rather than to inscribe upon ignoble blue plates the names of all the celebrities dear to Larousse!) The beautiful houses of former days seem in some undiscoverable way to be more living when we discover them in the Street of the Red Mail, the Street of the Trellis, the Street of the White Pigeons, the Street of Tiphaine's Well, the Street of the Little Chaâlis, the Impasse du Courtillet, etc.... An amusing sign which represents three scholars arguing with an ape would no longer have any flavor if we had to seek for it in some Place Garibaldi; it is delicious when found at Unicom Crossways. On the old Town Hall, an inscription continues to indicate the position of the rabbit and broom market; and it is very fine that the name of Louis Blanc or of Gambetta has not been given to the Street of the Cheese Makers, were it only out of consideration for that excellent Jean de Jandun who, decidedly, well knew how to appreciate all the merits of Senlis, for he wrote in regard to the cheeses of his native town: "The sweetest milk, a butter without admixture, fat cheeses, served in abundance to mean and minor purses, banish that furious activity of the brain which fatigues almost without exception the majority of admirers of highly spiced meats, and thus furnish the well-regulated habitude of a tranquil life and a simplicity of the dove." Façades, names and