he things that
have happened behind the splendid walls, I can hear history's heart
beating as if it and the world were young with me.

This chateau country of the Loire must be one of the most interesting
spots on earth, centring as it did the old Court life of France, and
Brown says it really is so. He has travelled tremendously and remembers
everything, though he _is_ nothing but a _chauffeur_.

Each place we have come to I have thought must be the best; but I know
that no other castle will make me take Amboise down off the pedestal
I've set it on, in my mind.

As I glanced up at it in the sunshine the great white carved _facade_
dazzled me. It looked as if it had been cut out of ivory. The bridge
rests on an island in the middle of the wide, yellow, slow-moving stream
of the Loire, which has a curiously still surface like ice. Brown drove
slowly without my having to ask. He's wonderful that way. He always
knows what you are feeling, as if you had telegraphed him the news. And
there before us lay the little town of Amboise, sprinkled along the
river-bank as if each house were a votive offering on the shrine of the
Chateau towering above on its plateau of rock.

I couldn't make out the architecture at first. The castle was just a
vast, dazzling complication of enormous round towers, bastions,
terraces, balconies, and crenellations. Oh, those balconies! Instantly I
could see poor little fainting Queen Mary held up by wicked Catherine de
Medici--the record wickedest mother-in-law of history--to watch the
execution of the Huguenots. And then the row of heads hanging from the
balcony afterwards, like terrible red gargoyles! When we went into the
Chateau later the custodian, or whatever you call him, showed us where
the fine ironwork was stained and rusted with the Huguenots' blood.

I was very angry with Aunt Mary because she kept her nose in her
Baedeker, and preferred reading about the castle to seeing it when she
had the chance. I have my opinion of people who won't take their
Baedeker in doses either before or after meals of sight-seeing; but Aunt
Mary spreads it so thick over hers that what's underneath is lost.

We drove to a nice little hotel tucked away at the foot of the Chateau,
for _dejeuner_, and to get rid of our luggage, for we'd have to stop at
Amboise till the four new tyres (which Brown now wired for) should
arrive from Paris. We had so many courses that I grew quite impatient,
for I wanted to be off