an old resort of mine. Seven years now has
old Leah filled my breakfast cup with a coffee that deserves a hymn of
praise in its honor. I like it hot--boiling, blistering hot, and the
old woman brings it on the run, her white sabots clattering across the
flower-smothered courtyard. During all these years I have followed
with reverent fingers not only the slopes of its roof but the loops of
swinging clematis that crowd its balconies and gabies as well. I say
"my" because I have known this Inn of William the Conqueror long
enough to include it in the list of the many good ones I frequent
over Europe--the Bellevue, for instance, at Dordrecht, over against
Papendrecht (I shall be there in another month). And the Britannia in
Venice, and I hope still a third in unknown Athens--unknown to me--my
objective point this year.

This particular Inn with the roof and the clematis, is at Dives, twenty
miles from Trouville on the coast. You never saw anything like it, and
you never will again. I hold no brief for my old friend Le Remois, the
proprietor, but the coffee is not the only thing over which grateful
men chant hymns. There is a kitchen, resplendent in polished brass,
with three French chefs in attendance, and a two-century-old spit for
roasting. There is the wine-cellar, in which cobwebs and not labels
record the age and the vintage; there is a dining-room--three of
them--with baronial fireplaces, sixteenth-century furniture, and linen
and glass to match--to say nothing of tapestries, Spanish leathers,
shrines, carved saints, ivories, and pewter--the whole a sight to turn
bric-a-brac fiends into burglars--not a difficult thing by the way--and
then, of course--there is the bill!

"Where have you been, M. Le Remois?" asked a charming woman.

"To church, Madame."

"Did you say your prayers?"

"Yes, Madame," answered this good boni-face, with a twinkle.

"What did you pray for?"

"I said--'Oh, Lord!--do not make me rich, but place me _next_ to the
rich'"--and he kept on his way rubbing his hands and chuckling. And yet
I must say it is worth the price.

I have no need of a William here--nor of anybody else. The water for my
cups is within my reach; convenient umbrellas on movable pedestals can
be shoved into place; a sheltered back porch hives for the night all my
paraphernalia and unfinished sketches, and a step or two brings me to
a table where a broiled lobster fresh from the sea and a peculiar peach
ablaze in a pecul