grey showers fall steadily, the trees hang limp, and the face of
the stream is spoiled with dimpling raindrops. Yesterday's lilies
encumber the garden walk, or begin, dismally enough, their voyage
towards the Seine and the salt sea. A sickly shimmer lies upon the
dripping house roofs, and all the colour is washed out of the green and
golden landscape of last night, as though an envious man had taken a
water-colour sketch and blotted it together with a sponge. We go out
a-walking in the wet roads. But the roads about Grez have a trick of
their own. They go on for a while among clumps of willows and patches of
vine, and then, suddenly and without any warning, cease and determine in
some miry hollow or upon some bald knowe; and you have a short period of
hope, then right-about face, and back the way you came! So we draw about
the kitchen fire and play a round game of cards for ha'pence, or go to
the billiard-room for a match at corks; and by one consent a messenger
is sent over for the wagonette--Grez shall be left to-morrow.

To-morrow dawns so fair that two of the party agree to walk back for
exercise, and let their knapsacks follow by the trap. I need hardly say
they are neither of them French; for, of all English phrases, the phrase
"for exercise" is the least comprehensible across the Straits of Dover.
All goes well for a while with the pedestrians. The wet woods are full
of scents in the noontide. At a certain cross, where there is a
guard-house, they make a halt, for the forester's wife is the daughter
of their good host at Barbizon. And so there they are hospitably
received by the comely woman, with one child in her arms and another
prattling and tottering at her gown, and drink some syrup of quince in
the back parlour, with a map of the forest on the wall, and some prints
of love-affairs and the great Napoleon hunting. As they draw near the
Quadrilateral, and hear once more the report of the big guns, they take
a by-road to avoid the sentries, and go on a while somewhat vaguely,
with the sound of the cannon in their ears and the rain beginning to
fall. The ways grow wider and sandier; here and there there are real
sand hills, as though by the seashore; the fir-wood is open and grows in
clumps upon the hillocks, and the race of sign-posts is no more. One
begins to look at the other doubtfully. "I am sure we should keep more
to the right," says one; and the other is just as certain they should
hold to the left. And n