Years' War.
4. Outpost stations guarding fords, roads into a town, and passes into
a country.

And I shall begin with No. 3--The Castles of the _routiers_.

The face of a country is like that of a woman. It tells the story of
its past. The many-windowed English mansion sleeping among turfy lawns
to the plash of a fountain, and the cawing of rooks in the beechwood,
tell of a tranquil past life-record broken only by transient unrest;
whereas the towers on the Continent with their _meurtrieres_ and
frowning machicolations, bristling on every hill, frequent as church
spires, now gutted and ruinous, proclaim a protracted reign of
oppression and then a sudden upheaval in resentment and a firebrand
applied to them all. The old English mansion has its cellars, but never
an _oubliette_, its porch-door always open to welcome a neighbour
and to relieve the indigent. It was not insulated by a dyke, and its
doors clenched with a portcullis. The spoils of the chase were not a
drove of "lifted" cattle taken from a peasant left stark upon his
threshold, but foxes' masks and the antlers of deer. The pigeons coo
about the English gables and the peacock dreams in the sun on the
balustrade of the terrace, as in past centuries, but the castle of the
French noble and the burg of the German ritter are given over to the
bats and owls, and are quarries whence the peasants pick out the
heraldic carvings for the construction of their pig-styes.

Nowhere did tears so stain and furrow the face of the land as in that
portion of France that was ceded to England. De Quincey says: "Within
fifty years in three pitched battles that resounded to the ends of the
earth, the chivalry of France had been exterminated. Her oriflamme had