If, however, that bores you,--it would me,--you can sit under the trees
and close your eyes while I give you a Stoddard lecture without the
slides. I shall tell you about the little walled town of Crecy, still
surrounded by its moat, where the tiny little houses stand in gardens
with their backs on the moat, each with its tiny footbridge, that pulls
up, just to remind you that it was once a royal city, with drawbridge
and portcullis, a city in which kings used to stay, and in which Jeanne
d'Arc slept one night on her way back from crowning her king at Rheims:
a city that once boasted ninety-nine towers. Half a dozen of these
towers still stand. Their thick walls are now pierced with windows, in
which muslin curtains blow in the wind, to say that to-day they are the
humble homes of simple people, and to remind you of what warfare was in
the days when such towers were a defense. Why, the very garden in which
you will be sitting when I tell you this was once a part of the royal
estate, and the last Lord of the Land was the Duke de Penthievre. I
thought that fact rather amusing when I found it out, considering that
the house I came so near to taking at Poigny was on the Rambouillet
estate where his father, the Duke de Toulouse, one of Louis XIV's
illegitimate sons, died, where the Duke de Penthievre was born, and
where he buried his naughty son, the Duke de Lamballe.

Of course, while I am telling you things like this you will have to
bring your imagination into play, as very few vestiges of the old days
remain. I still get just as much fun out of Il y avait une fois, even
when the "once on a time" can only be conjured up with closed eyes.
Still, I can show you some dear little old chapels, and while I am
telling you about it you will probably hear the far-off, sad tolling of
a bell, and I shall say to you "Ca sonne a Bouleurs." It will be the
church bells at Bouleurs, a tiny, tree-shaded hamlet, on another
hilltop, from which, owing to its situation, the bells, which rarely