Page:C N and A M Williamson - The Lightning Conductor.djvu/143

 which I settle, giving an account every few days. Do you recall your own story of the conscientious Yankee from the country who failed in his efforts to eat straight through the menu at a Paris hotel dinner, and appealed to the waiter to know whether he might now "skip from thar to thar"? Well, I would skip on my menu from Loches to Biarritz; but you were to have been my companion on this trip, and you cry for details.

From Loches we took a cross-country route which brought us out in the main road from Tours to Bordeaux at Dangé. There isn't much to say about that run, except that it was through agreeable, undulating country with wide horizons, like a thousand other undulations and horizons in France. At La Haye-Descartes we struck a pretty picture when crossing a bridge over the River Creuse. The setting sun had performed the miracle of turning the water into wine, and, chattering and laughing as if that wine had gone to their pretty heads, a company of girls and young women, all on their knees, cheerfully did their washing in the stream. It was one of those homely scenes that one is constantly coming across in this "pleasant land of France" to leave a picture in one's mind. Miss Randolph would have me stop the car on the bridge to watch it.

A queer thing about France, by the way. You and I have both been entertained right royally in jolly old châteaux by delightful French people of our own class. We know that life in such country houses can be as charming as it is in England; yet if one had never seen it from the inside, one would fancy in