It is an enviable thing to live in an ancient city like Rheims till its history becomes a part of the texture of one's mind, till the background of that history, hangs like a series of distinct pictures in one's thought, not to be effaced by anything that shall come afterward. The streets of Rheims as they then stood are photographed clearly on the retina of my mind's eye, and, dominating all, as it did at my first sight of it, is the majestic shape of the cathedral. I enter again, in imagination, those beautiful portals, and feel myself a tiny figure, and young in the midst of hoary antiquity. The organ music surges through the building, the choir-boys' voices soar above it. I see again the slanting fall of colored light across the wide gray floors, the soft blue smoke of the rising incense, the towering pillars, the vaulted roof, the dim vistas ending in the splendor of painted windows. Years and years of patient labor it took to rear this marvel. It represented the ideality of an age; it was, in fact, that ideality incarnate, left standing for all posterity to see and take inspiration from. It was at sunset one December day that I first entered Rheims. It was to be my home for the next eight years, for my father had been appointed by the American Government to be consul there. How eagerly, I remember, we looked out of the train window as we approached the city. Long before the town itself became distinct to our eyes, we could plainly see the cathedral, a superb silhouette, imposing and not to be forgotten. It was like one's first view of the ocean or the mountains or the desert. That night we slept opposite the cathedral in the eighteenth-century Hôtel Lion d'Or. I recollect the thrill of excitement my sister and I felt as the big bus rattled into the courtyard of that quaint hostelry and agile valets in yellow-and-black striped waistcoats ran to open the door for us. We felt that we were at last to live a storybook life of adventure and romance. The deep-toned bells of the cathedral awakened us at dawn, and in the pale light we rushed to the windows to look out on the sculptured façade of the wonderful building in order that we might feel again the strange charm that had so wrought upon us at our first sight of it. In the open square before us a valiant figure caught our attention, a figure of bronze that sat upon a spirited charger and held aloft a spear--Jeanne d'Arc, before the cathedral that had witnessed her brief hour of glory. The story we knew well, but shape and color it had never had before. The centuries before ours had been hardly more to us than Arabian Nights' tales, yet here was the visible evidence of the mighty procession of people who had existed before our day. We could not take the shortest walk in the city without being reminded of the dim perspective of history stretching far back of our youth, for here it was written in tangible and enduring stone.