teaux.

We made our headquarters at Blois, and again at Tours, for three days
each, and we explored the chateaux country, and some other more
humble outlying regions, to our hearts' content.

Blois is tourist-ridden; its hotels are partly of the tourist orders,
and its shopkeepers will sell you "American form" shoes and "best
English" hats. It is really too bad, for the overpowering splendours
of the chateau, the quaint old Renaissance house-fronts, the streets
of stairs, and the exceedingly picturesque and lively congregation of
countryside peasants on a market-day would make it a delightful
artists' sketching-ground were one not crowded out by "bounders" in
bowler hats and others of the genus tripper.

The Hotel d'Angleterre et de Chambord is good, well-conducted, and
well-placed, but it is as unsympathetically disposed an hostelry as
one is likely to find. Just why this is so is inexplicable, unless it
be that it is a frankly tourist hotel.

At Tours we did much better. The praises of the Hotel de l'Univers
are many; they have been sung by most latter-day travellers from
Henry James down; and the Automobile Club de France has bestowed its
recommendation upon it--which it deserves. For all this one is not
wholly at his ease here. We remembered that on one occasion, when we
had descended before its hospitable doors, travel-worn and weary, we
had been pained to find a sort of full-dress dinner going on where we
expected to find an ordinary _table d'hote_. For this reason alone we
passed the hotel by, and hunted out the quaintly named Hotel du
Croissant, in a dimly lighted little back street, indicated by a
flaring crescent of electric lights over its _porte-cochere_.

[Illustration: In Touraine]

We drove our automobile more or less noisily inside the little
flagged courtyard, woke up two dozing cats, who were lying
full-length before us, and disturbed a round dozen of sleek French
commercial travellers at their evening meal.

They treated us remarkably well at Tours's Hotel du Croissant.
"Follow the _commis-voyageur_ in France and dine well (and cheaply)"
might readily be the motto of all travellers in France. The bountiful
fare, the local colour, the hearty greeting, and equally hearty
farewell of the _patronne_, and the geniality of the whole personnel
gave us an exceedingly good impression of the contrast between the
tourist hotel of Blois and the _maison bourgeois_ of Tours, always to
the advantage of the