to go to the source, and not to Arc, would mean
dining with her; so that she was not an impartial adviser.

M. Paget was a short square man, of very few words, and his one object
in life seemed to be to save his black horse as much as possible; a
very creditable object in itself, so long as he did not go too far in
his endeavours to accomplish it. On the present occasion he certainly
did go too far. The road was quite as good as that which we had left,
and there was no reason in the world why the carriage should not have
taken us to the village. Worse still, we discovered eventually that
the 'twenty minutes' meant twenty minutes from the village to the
source, and represented really something like half the time necessary
for that part of the march, while there was a hot and dusty walk of
half an hour before we reached the village. As he accompanied us in
person, we had the satisfaction of frequently telling him our mind
with insular frankness. He pretended to be much distressed, but
assured us each time we returned to the charge--about every quarter of
an hour--that we were close to the desired spot. From the village to
the source, the way led us through such pleasant scenery and such
acceptable strawberries, that we only kept up our periodical
remonstrances on principle, and, after we had wound rapidly down
through a grand defile, and turned a sudden angle of the rock, the
first sight of that which we had come to see amply repaid us all the
trouble we had gone through. The source of the Orbe is sufficiently
striking, but the Loue is by far more grand at the moment of its
birth. The former is a bright fairy-like stream, gushing out of a
small cavern at the foot of a lofty precipice clothed with clinging
trees; but the Loue flows out from the bottom of an amphitheatrical
rock much more lofty and unbroken. The stream itself is broader and
deeper, and glides with an infinitely more majestic calmness from a
vast archway in the rock, into the recesses of which the eye can
penetrate to the point where the roof closes in upon the water, and so
cuts off all further view. The calmness of the flow may be in part
attributed to a weir, which has been built across the stream at the
mouth of the cave, for the purpose of driving a portion of the water
into a channel which conveys it to various mill-wheels; for, at a very
short distance below the weir, the natural stream makes a fall of 17
feet, so that, if left to itself, it might pro