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A FLIGHT TO THE NORTH-EAST eyrie of the "Eagle," it was one of the principal centres of Huguenot activity—an activity deplorably commemorated in the ravaged exterior of the church.

From Meaux to Rheims the country grows in charm, with a slightly English quality in its rolling spaces and rounded clumps of trees; but nothing could be more un-English than the grey-white villages, than the stony squares bordered by clipped horn-beams, the granite market-crosses, the round-apsed churches with their pointed bell-towers.

One of these villages, Braisne, stands out in memory by virtue of its very unusual church. This tall narrow structure, with its curious western front, so oddly buttressed and tapering, and rising alone and fragmentary among the orchards and kitchen-gardens of a silent shrunken hamlet, is the pathetic survival of a powerful abbey, once dominating its surroundings, but now existing only as the parish church of the knot of sleepy houses about it.

A stranger and less explicable vestige of the past is found not far off in the curious walled village of Bazoches, which, though lying in the [ 175 ]