oking and wondering, and drawing perhaps the hasty
comparisons of a novice, I saw a gentleman coming towards us with a
firm, quick step, his blue surtout buttoned tight over his breast, a
light walking-stick in his hand, and with the abstracted air of a man
who saw something beyond the reach of the bodily eye. It was Cooper,
just returning from a visit to the General, and dreaming perhaps of
his forest-paths or the ocean. His carriage with his family was coming
slowly on behind. A day earlier and I should have found them all at La
Grange.

It was evident that the good people of Rosay were accustomed to the
sight of travellers on their way to La Grange with a very small stock of
French; for I had hardly named the place, when a brisk little fellow,
announcing himself as the guide of all the _Messieurs Americains_,
swung my portmanteau upon his back and set out before me at the regular
jog-trot of a well-trained porter. The distance was but a mile, the
country level, and we soon came in sight of the castle. Castle, indeed,
it was, with its pointed Norman towers, its massive walls, and broad
moat,--memorials of other days,--and already gray with age before the
first roof-tree was laid in the land which its owner had helped to build
up to a great nation. On a hill-side its appearance would have been
grand. As it was, it was impressive, and particularly as first seen
from the road. The portcullis was gone, but the arched gateway still
remained, flanked by towers that looked sombre and stern, even amidst
the deep green of the ivy which covered the left tower almost to the
battlements. I was afterwards told that the ivy itself had a special
significance,--having been planted by Charles Fox, during a visit to La
Grange not long before his death. And Fox, it will be remembered, had
exerted all his eloquence to induce the English Government to demand the
liberation of Lafayette from Olmuetz,--an act which called down upon him
at the time the bitterest invectives of party rhetoric, but which the
historian of England now records as a bright page in the life of one of
her greatest men. Ah, how different would our record be, if we could
always follow our instinct of immortality, and in all our actions look
thoughtfully forward to the judgment of the future!

Passing under the massive arch, I found myself in the castle court.
Three sides of the edifice were still standing, darkened, indeed, and
distained by the winds and rains of cent