Middle Ages.

[Illustration: CHURCH-DOOR, ÉPERNAY.]

"Do you see those round, pot-bellied towers, like tuns of wine stood
upon end?" he said--"those donjons at the corners, tapering at the
top, and presenting the very image of noble bottles? There needs
nothing but that palace to convince you that you have arrived in the
champagne region."

"I do not know the building," I confessed.

"Can you not guess? Ah, but you should see it in a summer storm, when
the rain foams and spirts down those huge bottles of mason-work, and
the thunder pops among the roofs like the corks of a whole basket of
champagne! That fine castle, Flemming, is the château of Boursault,
apparently built in the era of the Crusades, but really a marvel of
yesterday. It rose into being, not to the sound of a lyre, like the
towers of Troy, but at the bursting of innumerable bottles, causing to
resound all over the world the name of the widow Cliquot."

At length we entered the station of Épernay. There I received my first
shock in learning that the only return-train stopping at Noisy was one
which left at midnight, and would land me in the extreme suburbs of
Paris at three o'clock in the morning.

Our friend Grandstone, whom we found amazing the streets of Épernay
with a light American buggy drawn by a colossal Morman horse, received
us with still more surprise than delight. He had relapsed into plain
James, and had never dreamed that his second baptism would bear fruit.