at six o'clock the next morning and making us fresh coffee which
was a dream of excellence. This is a good deal in its favour, for the
coffee of the ordinary French country hotel--in the north, in
particular--is fearfully and wonderfully made, principally of
chicory.

Sentiment would be served, and from Senlis we struck across forty
kilometres to what may be called the Dumas Country, Crepy-en-Valois
and Villers-Cotterets. Here was a little-trodden haunt which all
lovers of romance and history would naturally fall in love with.

Crepy is a snug, conservative little town where life goes on in much
the same way that it did in the days when Alexandre Dumas was a clerk
here in a notary's office, before he descended upon the Parisian
world of letters. His "Memoires" tell the story of his early
experiences here in his beloved Valois country. It is a charming
biographical work, Dumas's "Memoires," and it is a pity it is not
better known to English readers. Dumas tells of his journey by road,
from the town of his birth, Villers-Cotterets, to Crepy, with his
world's belongings done up in a handkerchief on a stick, "in bulk not
more grand than the luggage of a Savoyard when he leaves his native
mountain home."

Crepy has a delightfully named and equally excellent hotel in the
"Trois Pigeons," and one may eat of real country fare and be happy
and forget all about the ham and eggs and bad whiskey of Chantilly in
the contemplation of omelettes and chickens and fresh, green salads,
such as only the country innkeeper in France knows how to serve.
Crepy has a chateau, too, a relic of the days when the town was the
capital of a _petit gouvernement_ belonging to a younger branch of
the royal family of France in the fourteenth century. The chateau is
not quite one's ideal of what a great mediaeval chateau should be, but
it is sufficiently imposing to give a distinction to the landscape
and is in every way a very representative example of the construction
of the time.

The great _Route Nationale_ to the north runs through Crepy to-day,
as did the _Route Royale_ of the days of the Valois. It is eighteen
kilometres from Crepy to Villers-Cotterets, Dumas's birthplace. The
great romancer describes it with much charm and correctness in the
early pages of "The Taking of the Bastile." He calls it "a little
city buried in the shade of a vast park planted by Francois I. and
Henri II." It is a place ever associated with romance and history,
and