other, lay off the bank, and two girls, who were in charge of a flock of
geese as well as of the ferry, were willing to take me across. While the
elder ferried, the younger examined me carefully at close quarters,
and apparently with much interest. Presently she asked me if I sold
writing-paper. After landing, I soon reached the village of St. Mondane.
Here I halted at an inn in the shadow of old walnut-trees. A few yards off,
under one of the great trees, was a high wooden crucifix, around which some
twenty or thirty geese were standing or lying down, all in a digestive or
contemplative mood, and through the openings between the boles and the
branches were seen the sunlit meadows sloping to the low willows and the
flashing river.

From St. Mondane a charming road or lane between very high banks that are
almost cliffs leads upward to the Chateau de la Motte-Fenelon, where, in
1651, was born Francois de Salignac de la Motte, known to the world as
Fenelon. Having reached the top of the hill, I soon came in view of a
picturesque mass of masonry with round towers capped with pointed roofs,
and with Gothic gables hanging lightly in the air over dormer windows; the
whole rising out of a dense grove of trees in the midst of a quiet sunny
landscape. When quite near I found that the grove was a sombre little wood
of ever-green oaks. The same wood, if not the actual oaks, may have been
there in Fenelon's time, for the ilex is one of the commonest trees in
Perigord on the hills about the Dordogne. As a boy, while climbing here,
he may have torn his hose into tatters, notwithstanding his precocious
knowledge of Greek. The future churchman may even have robbed a jay's nest
on this very spot. What quietude and what deep shadow! Not a leaf stirred;
only a fiery shaft of sunshine forced its way here and there through the
dark roof of unchanging green to the brown soil and the rampart's mossy
wall.