atmosphere which made one want to linger within the confines
of the town long after his allotted time. We stayed nearly half a
day; we ate lunch in a little restaurant in the shadow of the bridge;
we bought and sent off picture postcards, and we took snap-shots and
strolled about and gazed at the little gem of a place until all the
gamins in town were following in our wake.

Compiegne was next in our itinerary. We knew Compiegne, from the
shore, as one might say, having passed and repassed it many times,
and we knew all its charms and attractions, or thought we did, but we
were not prepared for the effect of the rays of the setting sun on
the quaintly serrated sky-line of the roof-tops of the city, as we
saw it from the river.

It was bloody red, and the willows along the river's bank were a dim
purply melange of all the refuse of an artist's palette. Compiegne
has many sides, but its picturesque sunset side is the most
theatrical grouping of houses and landscape we had seen for many a
long day.

Here at Compiegne the vigour of the Oise ends. Above it is a weakly,
purling stream, the greater part of the traffic going by the Canal
Lateral, while below it broadens out into a workable, industrial sort
of a waterway which is doing its best to contribute its share to the
prosperity of France.

We learn here, as elsewhere, where it has been attempted, that the
hand of man cannot irretrievably make or reclaim the course of a
river. Deprived of its natural bed and windings, it will always form
new ones of its own making in conformity to the law of nature. The
attempt was made to straighten the course of the Oise, but in a very
short time the latent energies of the stream, more forceful than were
supposed, made fresh windings and turnings, the ultimate development
of which was found to very nearly approximate those which had
previously been done away with, and so the Canal Lateral, which
commences at Compiegne, was built.

Compiegne's attractions are many, its generally well-kept and
prosperous air, its most excellent hotels (two of them, though we
bestowed our august patronage on the Hotel de France), its chateau of
royal days of Louis XV., and its Hotel de Ville.

Stevenson, in his "Inland Voyage," has said that what charmed him
most at Compiegne was the Hotel de Ville. Truly this will be so with
any who have a soul above electric trams and the _art nouveau_; it is
the most dainty and lovable of Renaissance Hotels de