figures, in coarse gowns and worsted kerchiefs, toiled through the
fields, carrying full milk-jugs; brass _amphorae_ these latter might
have been, from their classical elegance of shape. Ploughmen appeared
and disappeared, they and their teams rising and sinking with the
varying heights and depressions of the more distant undulations. In the
nearer cottages the voices of children would occasionally fill the air
with a loud clamor of speech; then our steed's bell-collar would
jingle, and for the children's cries, a bird-throat, high above, from
the heights of a tall pine would pour forth, as if in uncontrollable
ecstasy, its rapture into the stillness of this radiant Normandy
garden. The song appeared to be heard by other ears than ours. We were
certain the dull-brained sheep were greatly affected by the strains of
that generous-organed songster--they were so very still under the pink
apple boughs. The cows are always good listeners; and now, relieved of
their milk, they lifted eyes swimming with appreciative content above
the grasses of their pasture. Two old peasants heard the very last of
the crisp trills, before the concert ended; they were leaning forth
from the narrow window-ledges of a straw-roofed cottage; the music gave
to their blinking old eyes the same dreamy look we had read in the
ruminating cattle orbs. For an aeronaut on his way to bed, I should
have felt, had I been in that blackbird's plumed corselet, that I had
had a gratifyingly full house.

Meanwhile, toward the west, a vast marine picture, like a panorama on
wheels, was accompanying us all the way. Sometimes at our feet, beneath
the seamy fissures of a hillside, or far removed by sweep of meadow,
lay the fluctuant mass we call the sea. It was all a glassy yellow
surface now; into the liquid mirror the polychrome sails sent down long
lines of color. The sun had sunk beyond the Havre hills, but the flame
of his mantle still swept the sky. And into this twilight there crept