For ten or twelve glorious summers I went there to spend my Thursday holidays, and I dreamed of it during the dreary intervening days of study. In May our friends the D-----s and Lucette went to their country home and remained until vintage time, usually until after the first October frost,--and regularly every Wednesday evening I was taken there. Nothing in my estimation was so delightful as that journey to Limoise. We scarcely ever went in a carriage, for it was not more than three and a half miles distant; to me, however, it seemed very far, almost lost in the woods. It lay toward the south, in the direction of those distant, sunny lands I loved to think of. (I would have found it less charming had it been towards the north.) Every Wednesday evening, at sunset, the hour therefore varying with the month, I left home accompanied by Lucette's elder brother, a grown boy of eighteen or twenty, who seemed to me a man of mature age. As far as I was able I tried to keep pace with him, and, in consequence, I was obliged to go more rapidly than when I walked with my father and sister; we went through the quiet streets lying near the ramparts, and passed the sailors' old barracks, the sounds of whose bugles and drums reached as far as my attic museum when the south wind blew; then we passed through the fortifications by the most ancient of its gray gates,--a gate almost abandoned, and used now principally by peasants with flocks of sheep and droves of cattle,--and finally we arrived at the road that led to the river. A mile and a half of straight road stretched before us, and this path lay between stunted old trees yellow with lichens whose branches were blown to the left by the force of the sea-winds that almost constantly came from the west, sweeping over the broad and level meadows that lay between us and the ocean. To those who have a conventionalized idea of country beauty, and to whom a charming landscape means a river winding its way between poplars, or a mountain crowned by an old castle, this level road would look very ugly. But I found it exquisite in spite of its straight lines. Upon the left there was nothing to be seen but grassy meadow land over which herds of cattle strayed. And before us, in the distance, something that resembled a line of ramparts shut in the plains sadly: it was the edge of a rocky plateau at whose base flowed the river. The far bank of this river was higher than the side that we were on, and was, in some respects, of a different character, but for the most part it was as flat and monotonous. And it is just this sameness that has so much charm for me, an attraction appreciated seemingly by few others. The great level plains with their calm and tranquil straight lines are deeply and profoundly inspiring.