Leighton was beyond being a guide. He was a companion. When he could, he
avoided big cities and monuments. He loved to stop for the night at
wayside inns where the accommodations were meager, but ample opportunity
was given for a friendly chat with the hostess cook. And if the inn was
one of those homely evening meeting-places for old folks, he would say:

"Lew, no country wears its heart on its sleeve, but 'way inside. Let us
live here a little while and feel the pulse of France."

When they crossed the border, he sat down under the first shade tree and
made Lewis sit facing him.

"This," he said gravely, "is an eventful moment. You have just entered a
strange country where cooks have been known to fry a steak and live.
There are people that eat the steaks and live. It is a wonderful
country. Their cooks are also generally ignorant of the axiomatic
mission of a dripping-pan, as soggy fowls will prove to you. But what we
lose in pleasing alimentation, we make up in scenery and food for
thought. Collectively, this is the greatest people on earth;
individually, the smallest. Their national life is the most communal,
the best regulated, the nearest socialistic of any in the world,
and--they live it by the inch."

One afternoon, after a long climb through an odorous forest of
red-stemmed pines, with green-black tops stretching for miles and miles
in an unbroken canopy, they came out upon a broad view that entranced
with its sense of illusion. Cities, like bunched cattle, dotted the vast
plain. Space and the wide, unhindered sweep of the eye reduced their
greatness to the dimensions of toy-land.