under and towards the brightening east. Just before the sun rose I
turned and looked backward from a high bridge that recrossed the
river. The long effort of the night had taken me well on my way. I was
out of the familiar region of the garrison. The great forest-hills
that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, catching the new
light; heavy, drifting, but white clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed
above them. The valley of the Moselle, which I had never thought of
save as a half mountainous region, had fallen, to become a kind of
long garden, whose walls were regular, low, and cultivated slopes.
The main waterway of the valley was now not the river but the canal
that fed from it.

The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering the river and the
canal seemed dark close to me, but the valley as a whole was vague, a
mass of trees with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the delicate
slopes bounding it on either side.

Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, that told me I had
walked thirty-two kilometres--which is twenty miles--from Toul; that
it was one kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much to a place
called Charmes. The sun rose in the mist that lay up the long even
trends of the vale, between the low and level hills, and I pushed on
my thousand yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special providence, I
found the entertainment and companionship whose lack had left me
wrecked all these early hours.

As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was a place on which a
book might easily be written, for it had a church built in the
seventeenth century, when few churches were built outside great towns,
a convent, and a general air of importance that made of it that grand
and noble thing, that primary cell of the organism of Europe, that
best of all Christian associations - a large village.

I say a book might be written upon it, and there is no doubt that a
great many articles and pamphlets must have been written upon it, for
the French are furiously given to local research and reviews, and to
glorifying their native places: and when they cannot discover folklore
they enrich their beloved homes by inventing it.

There was even a man (I forget his name) who wrote a delightful book
called _Popular and Traditional Songs of my Province,_ which book,
after he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own invention,
and not a word of it familiar to the inhabitants of the soil. He was a
larg