At the rear of the Hôtel Lion d'Or we could see the old hotel of the sign of the Maison Rouge, where the father and mother of Jeanne d'Arc were housed at the time of the crowning of the dauphin. We could walk over the cobblestone of the narrow rue de Tambour, which was once, so history says, one of the largest and most frequented of the streets of Rheims. We could look up at the Maison des Musiciens, so old a building that no one knows for what it was originally built. On its quaint façade how often we curiously examined the broken figures of the sculptured musicians, for this was the street down which the royal processions passed on their way to the coronation at the cathedral. The soldiers in the vanguard had struck and broken the statues with their spears to make way for the banners and pennants of the brilliant cavalcade. How full of color and splendor the street must have appeared then! But that was all past, and the musicians, in our time, looked down only upon market-women trundling their wares through to the market-place beyond. The old building, nevertheless, still served to re-create, in the fancy of two wondering girls, those stately yesterdays. In the rue Carnot how often we paused to glance up at a curious archway supporting two round towers! Old, very old it looked. And no wonder! for it dated from the Middle Ages. Under the arch we could catch a glimpse of the walls of the cathedral, gray as frost, and the prison, with beggars sitting in its grim shadow. How the past centuries peered out at us from every corner, showing in quaint portals such as the one on the school of the Petit Lycée, with its bas-reliefs of a laughing child on one side and a crying one on the other, known to the "_bons enfants_" since the beginning of the school as "_Jean qui rit_" and "_Jean qui pleure_." Or that of the old house of the La Salle family, in the rue de l'Arbalète, with its life-size figures of Adam and Eve to guard the entrance. When we walked down the rue Cérès we passed the house where Louis XIV's famous minister, Colbert, was born, and often pictured him coming out of the wide doorway, the courtly, velvet-clad figure that the portrait of him in the art museum had made familiar to our minds: for many a trip we made to the Hôtel des Ville to see the paintings and the wonderful illuminated books in the library and the beautiful old building itself. We would often stop, I remember, to read the list of marriages posted in the vestibule, the Maries, the Yvonnes, and the Marguerites, the Jeans, the Marcels, and Pierres who were to "live happily ever afterward," or so we confidently believed. Several years later the elder sister came with her lover to read shyly her own, for the old and dignified Salle des Marriages was to be the background of her romance, too.