tag over the door! I've no jewellery so lovely
as that cameo in stone; and I've got to leave it behind in Europe.

Poor Charles the Eighth, too, seemed to come to us like a human, every
day young man one knew when we saw the low doorway where he knocked his
head and killed himself, running in a great hurry to play tennis. How
little he guessed when he started that he should never have that game,
and why! I wonder if Anne was sorry when he died, or if she liked having
another wedding and being a queen all over again when she married Louis
the Twelfth?

I should have thought more about the ladies' love affairs, only I got
so interested in an _oubliette_, and in a perfectly Titanic round tower,
with an inclined plane corkscrewing up, round and round inside it, so
broad and so gradual that horses and carriages used in old, old days to
be driven from the town-level up to the top. "Only think what fun,
Brown," I couldn't help saying, "if we could drive the _car_ up here!"
"The idea!" sniffed Aunt Mary. "As if they'd allow such a thing!" But
Brown didn't answer; he just looked thoughtfully at the gradient.

We went up, too, on the top of one of the great towers of the castle
itself, and it was glorious to stand there looking away over the
windings of the river. We were at a bend midway between Blois and Tours,
and ever so far off we could see two little horns sticking up over the
undulations of the land. They were the towers of the cathedral of Tours;
and in that same direction Brown showed me a queer thing like a long,
thin finger pointing at the sky--the Lanterne of Rochecorbon. They used
to flash signals from it all the way to Amboise, and so on to Blois,
when any horror happened with which they were particularly pleased, like
a massacre of Huguenots.

Now, most patient gentleman, at last I've finished my harangue. I'm
ashamed to think how long it is, but I'm writing wrapped up in a warm
coat, under a _tilleul_ in the Chateau garden, where I've been allowed
to bring my campstool. Do you know what a _tilleul_ is? I don't believe
you do. I didn't till the other day; but I shan't tell you, except that
the very name suggests to me leisured ease and sauntering courtiers.
You must come over to France and find out--and incidentally fetch me
home--only not yet, please, oh, not yet. As for the _tilleul_, if you've
any romance left in your dear old body you'd love sitting under it, even
in winter. If it were summer, with the limes