expedition, to which the beauty of the afternoon (the
finest in a rainy season that was spotted with bright
days) contributed not a little. To go to Chambord,
you cross the Loire, leave it on one side, and strike
away through a country in which salient features be-
come less and less numerous, and which at last has
no other quality than a look of intense, and peculiar
rurality, - the characteristic, even when it is not the
charm, of so much of the landscape of France. This
is not the appearance of wildness, for it goes with
great cultivation; it is simply the presence of the
delving, drudging, economizing peasant. But it is a
deep, unrelieved rusticity. It is a peasant's landscape;
not, as in England, a landlord's. On the way to Cham-
bord you enter the flat and sandy Sologne. The wide
horizon opens out like a great _potager,_ without inter-
ruptions, without an eminence, with here and there a
long, low stretch of wood. There is an absence of
hedges, fences, signs of property; everything is ab-
sorbed in the general flatness, - the patches of vine-
yard, the scattered cottages, the villages, the children
(planted and staring and almost always pretty), the
women in the fields, the white caps, the faded blouses,
the big sabots. At the end of an hour's drive (they
assure you at Blois that even with two horses you will
spend double that time), I passed through a sort of
gap in a wall, which does duty as the gateway of the
domain of an exiled pretender. I drove along a
straight avenue, through a disfeatured park, - the park
of Chambord has twenty-one miles of circumference, -