roads. Touraine is a land of old chateaux, - a gallery
of architectural specimens and of large hereditary pro-
perties. The peasantry have less of the luxury of
ownership than in most other parts of France; though
they have enough of it to give them quite their share
of that shrewdly conservative look which, in the little,
chaffering, _place_ of the market-town, the stranger ob-
serves so often in the wrinkled brown masks that sur-
mount the agricultural blouse. This is, moreover, the
heart of the old French monarchy; and as that monarchy
was splendid and picturesque, a reflection of the splen-
dor still glitters in the current of the Loire. Some of
the most striking events of French history have occurred
on the banks of that river, and the soil it waters
bloomed for a while with the flowering of the Renais-
sance. The Loire gives a great "style" to a landscape
of which the features are not, as the phrase is, promi-
nent, and carries the eye to distances even more poetic
than the green horizons of Touraine. It is a very fit-
ful stream, and is sometimes observed to run thin and
expose all the crudities of its channel, - a great defect
certainly in a river which is so much depended upon
to give an air to the places it waters. But I speak of
it as I saw it last; full, tranquil, powerful, bending in
large slow curves, and sending back half the light of
the sky. Nothing can be finer than the view of its
course which you get from the battlements and ter-
races of Amboise. As I looked down on it from that
elevation one lovely Sunday morning, through a mild
glitter of autumn sunshine, it seemed the very model