Marne
is one of the most productive in France, and every inch under
cultivation. It is what the French call un paysage riant, and I assure
you, it does more than smile these lovely June mornings. I am up every
morning almost as soon as the sun, and I slip my feet into sabots, wrap
myself in a big cloak, and run right on to the lawn to make sure that
the panorama has not disappeared in the night. There always lie--too
good almost to be true--miles and miles of laughing country, little
white towns just smiling in the early light, a thin strip of river here
and there, dimpling and dancing, stretches of fields of all colors--all
so, peaceful and so gay, and so "chummy" that it gladdens the opening
day, and makes me rejoice to have lived to see it. I never weary of it.
It changes every hour, and I never can decide at which hour it is the
loveliest. After all, it is a rather nice world.

Now get out your map and locate me.

You will not find Huiry. But you can find Esbly, my nearest station on
the main line of the Eastern Railroad. Then you will find a little
narrow-gauge road running from there to Crecy-la-Chapelle. Halfway
between you will find Couilly-Saint-Germain. Well, I am right up the
hill, about a third of the way between Couilly and Meaux.

It is a nice historic country. But for that matter so is all France. I
am only fifteen miles northeast of Bondy, in whose forest the naughty
Queen Fredegonde, beside whose tomb, in Saint-Denis, we have often stood
together, had her husband killed, and nearer still to Chelles, where the
Merovingian kings once had a palace stained with the blood of many
crimes, about which you read, in many awful details, in Maurice
Strauss's "Tragique Histoire des Reines Brunhaut et Fredegonde," which I
remember to have sent you when it first came out. Of course no trace of
those days of the Merovingian dynasty remains here or anywhere else.
Chelles is now one of the fortified places in the outer belt of forts
surrounding Paris.

So, if you will not accept all this as an explanation of what you are
pleased to call my "desertion," may I humbly and reluctantly put up a
plea for my health, and hope for a sympathetic hearing?

If I am to live much longer,--and I am on the road down the hill, you
know,--I demand of Life my physical well-being. I want a robust old
age. I feel that I could never hope to have that much longer in
town,--city-born and city-bred though I am. I used to thin