ow, suddenly, the heavens open, and the rain
falls "sheer and strong and loud," as out of a shower-bath. In a moment
they are as wet as shipwrecked sailors. They cannot see out of their
eyes for the drift, and the water churns and gurgles in their boots.
They leave the track and try across country with a gambler's
desperation, for it seems as if it were impossible to make the situation
worse; and, for the next hour, go scrambling from boulder to boulder, or
plod along paths that are now no more than rivulets, and across waste
clearings where the scattered shells and broken fir-trees tell all too
plainly of the cannon in the distance. And meantime the cannon grumble
out responses to the grumbling thunder. There is such a mixture of
melodrama and sheer discomfort about all this, it is at once so grey and
so lurid, that it is far more agreeable to read and write about by the
chimney-corner than to suffer in the person. At last they chance on the
right path, and make Franchard in the early evening, the sorriest pair
of wanderers that ever welcomed English ale. Thence, by the Bois
d'Hyver, the Ventes-Alexandre, and the Pins Brules, to the clean
hostelry, dry clothes, and dinner.

THE WOODS IN SPRING

I think you will like the forest best in the sharp early spring-time,
when it is just beginning to re-awaken, and innumerable violets peep
from among the fallen leaves; when two or three people at most sit down
to dinner, and, at table, you will do well to keep a rug about your
knees, for the nights are chill, and the salle-a-manger opens on the
court. There is less to distract the attention, for one thing, and the
forest is more itself. It is not bedotted with artists' sunshades as
with unknown mushrooms, nor bestrewn with the remains of English
picnics. The hunting still goes on, and at any moment your heart may be
brought into your mouth as you hear far-away horns; or you may be told
by an agitated peasant that the Vicomte has gone up the avenue, not ten
minutes since, "_a fond de train, monsieur, et avec douze piqueurs._"

If you go up to some coign of vantage in the system of low hills that
permeates the forest, you will see many different tracts of country,
each of its own cold and melancholy neutral tint, and all mixed together
and mingled the one into the other at the seams. You will see tracts of
leafless beeches of a faint yellowish grey, and leafless oaks a little
ruddier in the hue. Then zones of pine of a solemn