Tours was beloved by French royalty. It was the capital of a province as rich as it was beautiful. Among French provinces, Touraine was always the aristocrat. Its language has been kept pure. To this day, the purest French in the world is spoken at Tours. The mechanic who made some repairs for me at the garage leaned on the mud-guard, during a brief intermission of that hottest of days, and told me about the purity of the French language at Tours; and if there was anything wrong with his own locution, my ear was not fine enough to detect it. To me it seemed as limpid as something distilled. Imagine such a thing happening in--say Bridgeport. Tours is still proud, still the aristocrat, still royal. The Germans held Tours during the early months of 1871, but there is now no trace of their occupation. It was a bad dream which Tours does not care even to remember. Tours contains a fine cathedral, and the remains of what must have been a still finer one--two noble towers, so widely separated by streets and buildings that it is hard to imagine them ever having belonged to one structure. They are a part of the business of Tours now. Shops are under them, lodgings in them. One of these old relics is called the clock-tower, the other, the tower of Charlemagne, because Luitgard, his third queen, was buried beneath it. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MOTORING THROUGH THE GOLDEN AGE--PART II BY ALBERT BIGELOW PAINE It was a July morning when we got away from Tours--one of those sweltering mornings--and I had spent an hour or two at the garage putting on all our repaired tires and one new one. It was not a good morning for exercise; and by the time we were ready to start, I was a rag. Narcissa photographed me, because she said she had never seen me look so interesting before. She made me stand in the sun bareheaded and hold a tube in my hand, as if I had not enough to bear, already. But I was repaid the moment we were off. Oh, but it was cool and delicious gliding along the smooth, shaded road! One can almost afford to get as hot and sweltering and cross and gasping as I was for the sake of sitting back and looking across the wheel down a leafy avenue facing the breeze of your own making, a delicious nectar that bathes you through and cools and rests and soothes--an anodyne of peace.