u should have gone out to meet them on the road to
Saint-Remy. And what a sight you have missed! Oh, how beautiful it
was when they came marching into Maillane--the drums, the trumpets,
the pages, the camels! _Mon Dieu_, what a commotion! What a sight it
was! And now they are in the church, making their homage before the
manger in which the little Christ-Child lies. But never mind; after
supper you shall see them all."

Then we would sup quickly, and so be off to the church, crowded with
all Maillane. Barely would we be entered there when the organ would
begin, at first softly and then bursting forth formidably, all our
people singing with it, with the superb noel:

In the early morning
I met a train
Of three great Kings who were going on a journey!

High up before the altar, directly above the manger in which the
Christ-Child was lying, would be the glittering _bello estello_;
and making their homage before the manger would be the Kings whom it
had guided thither from the East: old white-bearded King Melchior
with his gift of incense; gallant young King Gaspard with his gift
of treasure; black King Balthazar the Moor with his gift of myrrh.
How reverently we would gaze on them, and how we would admire the
brave pages who carried the trains of their long mantles, and the
hump-backed camels whose heads towered high above Saint Mary and
Saint Joseph and the ox and the ass.

Yes, there they were at last--the Kings!

Many and many a time in the after years have I gone a-walking on the
Arles road at nightfall on the Eve of the Kings. It is the same--but not
the same. The sun, over beyond the Rhone, is dipping toward the
Cevennes; the leafless trees are red in the low sun-rays; across the
fields stretch the black lines of cypress; even the old man, as long
ago, is scratching in the hedge by the roadside for snails. And when
darkness comes quickly, with the sun's setting, the owls hoot as of
old.

But in the radiant glory of the sunset I no longer see the dazzle and
the splendour of the Kings!

"Which way went they, the Kings?"

"Behind the mountains!"

VIII

In the morning of the day preceding Christmas a lurking, yet
ill-repressed, excitement pervaded the Chateau and all its dependencies.
In the case of the Vidame and Mise Fougueiroun the excitement did not
even lurk: it blazed forth