Fare thee well! and if forever,
Still forever fare thee well!

LORD BYRON.

Do you know that charming part of our country which has been called the
garden of France--that spot where, amid verdant plains watered by wide
streams, one inhales the purest air of heaven?

If you have travelled through fair Touraine in summer, you have no doubt
followed with enchantment the peaceful Loire; you have regretted the
impossibility of determining upon which of its banks you would choose to
dwell with your beloved. On its right bank one sees valleys dotted with
white houses surrounded by woods, hills yellow with vines or white with
the blossoms of the cherry-tree, walls covered with honeysuckles,
rose-gardens, from which pointed roofs rise suddenly. Everything reminds
the traveller either of the fertility of the land or of the antiquity of
its monuments; and everything interests him in the work of its busy
inhabitants.

Nothing has proved useless to them; it seems as if in their love for so
beautiful a country--the only province of France never occupied by
foreigners--they have determined not to lose the least part of its soil,
the smallest grain of its sand. Do you fancy that this ruined tower is
inhabited only by hideous night-birds? No; at the sound of your horse's
hoofs, the smiling face of a young girl peeps out from the ivy, whitened
with the dust from the road. If you climb a hillside covered with vines,
a light column of smoke shows you that there is a chimney at your feet;
for the very rock is inhabited, and families of vine-dressers breathe in
its caverns, sheltered at night by the kindly earth which they
laboriously cultivate during the day. The good people of Touraine are as
simple as their life, gentle as the air they breathe, and strong as the
powerful earth they dig. Their countenances, like their characters, have
something of the frankness of the true people of St. Louis; their
chestnut locks are still long and curve around their ears, as in the
stone statues of our old kings; their language is the purest French, with
neither slowness, haste, nor accent--the cradle of the language is there,
close to the cradle of the monarchy.

But the left bank of the stream has a more serious aspect; in the
distance you see Chambord, which, with its blue domes and little cupolas,
appears like some great city of the Orient; there is Chanteloup, raising
its graceful pagoda in the air. Near these a