Yesterday I explored the top of Bourmont Hill. It is here that the Quality Folk live, and here are some stately old houses with beautiful carved doorways and even an occasional gargoyle. Here too the general commanding the Division lives, and I have often observed with glee corpulent colonels and rotund majors puffing and blowing and growing red in the face as they climbed the hill to Headquarters. At the top of the hill there are two churches. Some two weeks ago, it is whispered, a spy was caught signaling from the tower of Notre Dame. His signals, it is said, were flashed to another spy stationed on the hills to the east, who in turn sent the messages on to the lines. The Curé of Notre Dame is being held under suspicion of complicity. From Notre Dame an avenue bordered by magnificent old trees sweeps around to the Calvary, a tall wooden cross surmounting a curious structure of rough stone, ringed about with shallow steps—the Mecca of many pilgrimages. Beyond the Calvary one comes to the Mystery of Bourmont. A faded sign declares _Défense d’éntrée_, but one looks the other way and slips by. For once past the gate you are in an atmosphere of enchantment. No one seems to know just what it is, nor how it came about; I can get no intelligent explanation from Madame or Monsieur. To me it seems like the forgotten playground of an old mad king in some fantastic legend. For here among the trees are stone stairs, walls and terraces, and, cut in the curiously cleft rocks, are niches and tunnelled passage-ways, all mantled over now with green moss and ivy, the whole making one think of a dream garden out of Mæterlinck. Coming down Bourmont Hill afterwards I was startled by the beating of a drum; looking back I saw a woman, bare-headed, her blue apron fluttering in the wind, descending the street after me; from her shoulders was slung the drum which she was beating with a martial vim. It was the town-crier, _le tambour_ as the French put it. Arrived at an appropriate spot, she stopped, pulled out a paper, cried “_Avis!_” and began to read in a rapid high official monotone. The wash-house was to be closed between two and four o’clock the following afternoon on account of the new water system the Americans were installing. Certain requisitions of grain were to be levied.... The villagers were notified to call at the Mayory for their bread cards, without which, after such a date, no bread could be obtained.... One or two women came to the doors of the houses and listened. She took no notice of them. The reading over, she rolled the paper up with a quick decisive gesture, and resumed her march, the sharp rub-a-dub-dub of her drum pursuing me all the way to Saint Thiebault. Of late the air has become fairly vibrant with disquieting rumours: one does not know what to believe, what to reject.