pril, and a thousand pleasant
sounds of birds in hedges, of wind in the boughs, of brooks trotting
merrily under the rustic bridges. And this fresh nature is peopled by
girls eternally young, natural, gay, or pensive, standing with eager feet
on the threshold of their life, innocent, expectant, with the old ballads
of old France on their lips. For the story is full of those artless,
lisping numbers of the popular French Muse, the ancient ballads that
Gerard collected and put in the mouth of Sylvie, the pretty peasant girl.

Do you know what it is to walk alone all day on the Border, and what good
company to you the burn is that runs beside the highway? Just so
companionable is the music of the ballads in that enchanted country of
Gerard's fancy, in the land of the Valois. All the while you read, you
have a sense of the briefness of the pleasure, you know that the hero
cannot rest here, that the girls and their loves, the cottage and its
shelter, are not for him. He is only passing by, happy yet wistful, far
untravelled horizons are alluring him, the great city is drawing him to
herself and will slay him one day in her den, as Scylla slew her victims.

Conceive Gerard living a wild life with wilder young men and women in a
great barrack of an old hotel that the painters amused themselves by
decorating. Conceive him coming home from the play, or rather from
watching the particular actress for whom he had a distant, fantastic
passion. He leaves the theatre and takes up a newspaper, where he reads
that tomorrow the Archers of Senlis are to meet the Archers of Loisy.
These were places in his native district, where he had been a boy. They
recalled many memories; he could not sleep that night; the old scenes
flashed before his half-dreaming eyes. This was one of the visions.

"In front of a _chateau_ of the time of Henri IV., a _chateau_ with
peaked lichen-covered roofs, with a facing of red brick varied by
stonework of a paler hue, lay a wide, green lawn set round with limes and
elms, and through the leaves fell the golden rays of the setting sun.
Young girls were dancing in a circle on the mossy grass, to the sound of
airs that their mothers had sung, airs with words so pure and natural
that one felt one's self indeed in that old Valois land, where for a
thousand years has beat the heart of France.

"I was the only boy in the circle whither I had led my little friend,
Sylvie, a child of a neighbouring hamlet; Sylv