orner in all France, have listened to a traveller's
tale, and believed in a silent Amboise? Is there no limit to human
credulity? Does experience count for nothing in the Bourbon-like
policy of our lives? It is to England we must go if we seek for silence,
that gentle, pervasive silence which wraps us in a mantle of content.
It was in Porlock that Coleridge wrote "Kubla Khan," transported,
Heaven knows whither, by virtue of the hushed repose that consecrates
the sleepiest hamlet in Great Britain. It was at Stoke Pogis that
Gray composed his "Elegy." He could never have written--

"And all the air a solemn stillness holds,"

in the vicinity of a French village.

But Amboise! Who would go to rural England, live on ham and eggs,
and sleep in a bed harder than Pharaoh's heart, if it were possible
that a silent Amboise awaited him? The fair fresh vegetables of
France, her ripe red strawberries and glowing cherries, her crisp
salads and her caressing mattresses lured us no less than the vision
of a bloodstained castle, and the wide sweep of the Loire flashing
through the joyous landscape of Touraine. In the matter of beauty,
Amboise outstrips all praise. In the matter of romance, she leaves
nothing to be desired. Her splendid old Chateau--half palace and half
fortress--towers over the river which mirrors its glory and
perpetuates its shame. She is a storehouse of historic memories, she
is the loveliest of little towns, she is in the heart of a district
which bears the finest fruit and has the best cooks in France; but
she is not, and never has been, silent, since the days when Louis
the Eleventh was crowned, and she gave wine freely to all who chose
to be drunk and merry at her charge.

If she does not give her wine to-day, she sells it so cheaply--lying
girt by vine-clad hills--that many of her sons are drunk and merry
still. The sociable habit of setting a table in the open street
prevails at Amboise. Around it labourers take their evening meal,
to the accompaniment of song and sunburnt mirth. It sounds poetic
and it looks picturesque,--like a picture by Teniers or Jan
Steen,--but it is not a habit conducive to repose.

As far as I can judge,--after a month's experience,--the one thing
no inhabitant of Amboise ever does is to go to bed. At midnight the
river front is alive with cheerful and strident voices. The French
countryman habitually speaks to his neighbour as if he were half a
mile away; and when a score of