atural strength which enables them to bark twenty-four hours
without intermission, or whether they divide themselves into day and
night pickets, so that, when one band retires to rest, the other takes
up the interrupted duty. The French villager, who values all domestic
pets in proportion to the noise they can make, delights especially
in his dogs, giant black-and-tan terriers for the most part, of
indefatigable perseverance in their one line of activity. Their bark
is high-pitched and querulous rather than deep and defiant, but for
continuity it has no rival upon earth. Our hotel--in all other
respects unexceptionable--possesses two large bulldogs which have
long ago lost their British phlegm, and acquired the agitated yelp
of their Gallic neighbours. They could not be quiet if they wanted
to, for heavy sleigh-bells (unique decorations for a bulldog) hang
about their necks, and jangle merrily at every step. In the courtyard
lives a colony of birds. One virulent parrot which shrieks its
inarticulate wrath from morning until night, but which does--be it
remembered to its credit--go to sleep at sundown; three paroquets;
two cockatoos of ineffable shrillness, and a cageful of canaries and
captive finches. When taken in connection with the dogs, the hotel
cat, the operatic Armand, and the cook who plays "See, O Norma!" on
his flute every afternoon and evening, it will be seen that Amboise
does not so closely resemble the palace of the Sleeping Beauty as
Mr. Molloy has given us to understand.

All other sounds, however, melt into a harmonious murmur when
compared to the one great speciality of the village,--stone-cutting
in the open streets. Whenever one of the picturesque old houses is
crumbling into utter decay, a pile of stone is dumped before it, and
the easy-going masons of Amboise prepare to patch up its walls. No
particular method is observed, the work progresses after the fashion
of a child's block house, and the principal labour lies in dividing
the lumps of stone. This is done with a rusty old saw pulled slowly
backward and forward by two men, the sound produced resembling a
succession of agonized shrieks. It goes on for hours and hours, with
no apparent result except the noise; while a handsome boy, in a
striped blouse and broad blue sash, completes the discord by currying
the stone with an iron currycomb,--a process I have never witnessed
before, and ardently hope never to witness again. If one could
imagine fif