there till morning. The slight
consternation of the cabaret-keeper and his wife over this long-haired
phantom, with glittering, deep-set eyes, was soothed by a royally-flung
gold coin, and a few words of French slang picked up in the arena,
which, with the name of Havre, comprised Dick's whole knowledge of
the language. But he was touched with their ready and intelligent
comprehension of his needs, and their genial if not so comprehensive
loquacity. Luckily for his quick temper, he did not know that they had
taken him for a traveling quack-doctor going to the Fair of Yvetot, and
that madame had been on the point of asking him for a magic balsam to
prevent migraine.

He was up betimes and away, giving a wide berth to the larger towns;
taking byways and cut-offs, yet always with the Western pathfinder's
instinct, even among these alien, poplar-haunted plains, low-banked
willow-fringed rivers, and cloverless meadows. The white sun shining
everywhere,--on dazzling arbors, summer-houses, and trellises; on light
green vines and delicate pea-rows; on the white trousers, jackets, and
shoes of smart shopkeepers or holiday makers; on the white headdresses
of nurses and the white-winged caps of the Sisters of St. Vincent,--all
this grew monotonous to this native of still more monotonous wastes. The
long, black shadows of short, blue-skirted, sabotted women and short,
blue-bloused, sabotted men slowly working in the fields, with slow oxen,
or still slower heavy Norman horses; the same horses gayly bedecked,
dragging slowly not only heavy wagons, but their own apparently more
monstrous weight over the white road, fretted his nervous Western
energy, and made him impatient to get on.

At the close of the second day he found some relief on entering a
trackless wood,--not the usual formal avenue of equidistant trees,
leading to nowhere, and stopping upon the open field,--but apparently
a genuine forest as wild as one of his own "oak bottoms." Gnarled roots
and twisted branches flung themselves across his path; his mustang's
hoofs sank in deep pits of moss and last year's withered leaves;
trailing vines caught his heavy-stirruped feet, or brushed his broad
sombrero; the vista before him seemed only to endlessly repeat the same
sylvan glade; he was in fancy once more in the primeval Western forest,
and encompassed by its vast, dim silences. He did not know that he had
in fact only penetrated an ancient park which in former days resounded