, being sufficiently accustomed to social banquets
to know that on such an occasion the oldest man present is expected to
propose the health of the ladies, when the door opened abruptly, and
a tall footman, bespattered with mud, a dripping umbrella in his hand,
perspiring, out of breath, cried to us, without respect for the company:

"But come on then, you set of idiots! What are you sticking here for?
Don't you know it is over?"

THE FESTIVITIES IN HONOUR OF THE BEY

In the regions of the Midi, of bygone civilization, historical castles
still standing are rare. Only at long intervals on the hillsides some
old abbey lifts its tottering and dismembered front, perforated by holes
that once were windows, whose empty spaces look now only to the sky.
A monument of dust, burnt up by the sun, dating from the time of the
Crusades or of the Courts of Love, without a trace of man among its
stones, where even the ivy no longer clings nor the acanthus, but which
the dried lavenders and the ferns embalm. In the midst of all those
ruins the castle of Saint-Romans is an illustrious exception. If you
have travelled in the Midi you have seen it, and you are to see it again
now. It is between Valence and Montelimart, on a site just where the
railway runs alongside the Rhone, at the foot of the rich slopes
of Baume, Raucoule, and Mercurol, where the far-famed vineyards of
l'Ermitage, spreading out for five miles in close-planted rows of vines,
which seem to grow as one looks, roll down almost into the river, which
is there as green and full of islands as the Rhine at Basle, but under
a sun the Rhine has never known. Saint-Romans is opposite on the other
side of the river; and, in spite of the brevity of the vision, the
headlong rush of the train, which seems trying to throw itself madly
into the Rhone at each turning, the castle is so large, so well situated
on the neighbouring hill, that it seems to follow the crazy race of the
train, and stamps on your mind forever the memory of its terraces, its
balustrades, its Italian architecture; two low stories surmounted by a
colonnaded gallery and flanked by two slate-roofed pavilions dominating
the great slopes where the water of the cascades rebounds, the network
of gravel walks, the perspective of long hedges, terminated by some
white statue which stands out against the blue sky as on the luminous
ground of a stained-glass window. Quite at the top, in the middle of the
vast lawns whos