QUOT.]

And his hand ceased squeezing my shoulder like a pincer to beat it
like a mallet. A rapid sketch of the situation was mapped out in my
head. I could reach Epernay by five o'clock, returning at eight, and,
notwithstanding this little lasso flung over the champagne-country, I
could resume my promenade and modify in no respect my original plan;
and I could say to Hohenfels, "My boy, I have popped a few corks with
the widow Cliquot."

Such was my vision. The gnomes of the railway, having once got me in
their grasp, disposed of me as they liked, and quite unexpectedly.

From the car-window, as in a panorama of Banvard's, the landscape spun
out before my eyes. Le Raincy, which I had intended to visit at all
events on the same day, but afoot, offered me the roofs of its ancient
chateau, a pile built in the most pompous spirit of the Renaissance,
and whose alternately round and square pavilions, tipped with steep
mansards, I was fain to people with throngs of gay visitors in the
costume of the _grand siecle_. Then came the cathedral of Meaux,
before which I reverently took off my cap to salute the great
Bossuet--"Eagle of Meaux," as they justly called him, and on the
whole a noble bird, notwithstanding that he sang his Te Deum over some
exceedingly questionable battle-grounds. Then there presented itself
a monument at which my engineering friend clapped his hands. It was
a crown of buildings with extinguisher roofs encircling the brow of
a hill, and presenting the antique appearance of some chastel of the
Middle Ages.

[Illustration: CHURCH-DOOR, EPERNAY.]

"Do you see those round, pot-bellied towers, like tuns of wine stood
upon end?" he said--"those donjons at the corners, tapering at the
top, and presenting the very image of noble bottles? There needs
nothing but that palace to convince you that you have arrived in the
champagne region."

"I do not know the building," I confessed.

"Can you not guess? Ah, but you should see it in a summer storm, when
the rain foams and spirts down those huge bottles of mason-work, and
the thunder pops among the roofs like the corks of a whole basket of
champagne! That fine castle, Flemming, is the chateau of Boursault,
apparently built in the era of the Crusades, but really a marvel of
yesterday. It rose into being, not to the sound of a lyre, like the
towers of Troy, but at the bursting of innumerable bottles, causing to
resound all over the world the name of the widow Cliq