e to leave everything just as it was, at least in Catherine's time.
And one can take the bad, Catherine taste out of one's mouth by thinking
of lovely little Mary Stuart singing like a lark through the rooms, and
living there and in the garden the happiest days that she was ever to
know.

One wouldn't suppose that a gloomy, plotting mind like Catherine's would
have had a place in it for creating beauty; but it had its one
ornamental corner, or she couldn't have thought out the bridge-gallery
thrown across the Cher, springing from the original building and
spanning the river to the farther shore.

There are two storeys over the bridge, long corridors, all windows, and
lovely green and gold river lights, netted over the floors and
walls--the most exquisite effect. I walked there, calling up the spirits
of vanished queens and princesses--the "dear, dead women," seeing "all
the gold that used to fall and hang about their shoulders." Oh, I've got
the quotation wrong, but it's Aunt Mary's fault, for at this very minute
she's reading aloud to herself in a guide-book about Rousseau and a lot
of other shining lights who used to visit Chenonceaux when it belonged
to Monsieur and Madame Dupin; but those days were comparatively modern,
so I don't take much interest. Nothing at Chenonceaux seems worth while
unless it happened before the days of Charles the Ninth.

Tours looked at first sight very sedate and grey, after Chenonceaux, for
the airy picture of the castle had kept floating before my eyes during
our run. It seems to me we are always on the other side of the river
from things, and have to get to them by crossing long bridges. We did it
again at Tours, and it was particularly long, and very fine. But it was
evening, and dim and bitterly cold; and I'm afraid I shouldn't have paid
as much attention to it as I did if Brown hadn't said that Balzac called
it "one of the finest monuments of France." And then in a minute, at the
entrance to the town, we saw two ghostly white statues glimmering in a
wide, green _place_. "There, miss, are the two tutelary geniuses of this
part of France," said Brown; "Rabelais and Descartes." By that time we
had flashed past, but I screwed my neck round to look back at them till
I got a "crick" in it. Have you ever noticed that most of the things
people tell you to look at, or that you particularly want to see in
life, are always behind your back or on one side, as if to give you the
greatest possi