on to Pontoise, all over as vile a stretch of road as one will
find in the north of France, always excepting the suburbs of St.
Germain.

Pontoise is all very well in its way, and is by no means a dull,
uninteresting town, but we had no thoughts for it at the moment;
indeed, we had no thoughts of anything but to put the horrible
suburban Paris _pave_ as far behind us as we could before we settled
down to enjoyment.

At Pontoise we suddenly discovered that we were on the wrong road. So
much for not knowing our way out of town--twenty-five kilometres of
axle-breaking cobblestones!

We had some consolation in knowing that it was equally as bad by any
northern road out of Paris, so we only had the trouble of making a
twenty-kilometre detour through the valley of the Oise, by our old
haunts of Auvers and L'Isle-Adam to Chantilly and Senlis.

We got our clue to the itinerary of the road to the north from a view
of an old poster issued by the "_Messageries Royales_" just previous
to the Revolution (a copy of which is given elsewhere in this book).

Many were the times we, and all well-habituated travellers in France,
had swung from Calais to Paris by train, with little thought indeed
as to what lay between. True, we had, more than once, "stopped off"
at Amiens and Abbeville to see their magnificent churches, and we had
spent a long summer at Etaples and Montreuil-sur-Mer, two "artists'
haunts" but little known to the general traveller; but we never
really knew the lay of the land north of Paris, except as we had got
it from the reading of Dumas, Stevenson's "Inland Voyage," and the
sentimental journeyings of the always delightful Sterne.

We made Chantilly our stop for lunch, _en route_ to Senlis. We ought
not to have done this, for what with the loafing horse-jockeys in the
cafes, and the trainers and "cheap sports" hanging about the hotels,
Chantilly does not impress one as the historical shrine that it
really is.

Chantilly is sporty, _tres sportive_, as the French call it, as is
inevitable of France's most popular race-track, and there is an odour
of America, Ireland, and England over all. How many jockeys of these
nationalities one really finds at Chantilly the writer does not know,
but, judging from the alacrity with which the hotels serve you ham
and eggs and the cafe waiters respond to a demand for whiskey
(Scotch, Irish, or American), it may be assumed that the alien
population is very large.

We had our lu