the old home-farm, and was connected by a single line of rails with
the station of La Tremblaye. The clear, pellucid stream where we
used to catch crayfish had been canalized--"s'est encanaille," as
Barty called it--its waters fouled by barge traffic and all kinds of
horrors.

We soon found the haunted pond that Barty was so fond of--but quite
in the open, close to an enormous brick-field, and only half full;
and with all its trees cut down, including the tree on which they
had hanged the gay young Viscount who had behaved so badly to
Seraphine Doucet, and on which Seraphine Doucet afterwards hanged
herself in remorse.

No more friendly charcoal-burners, no more wolves or boars or
cerfs--dix-cors; and as for were-wolves, the very memory of them had
died out.

There seems no greater desecration to me than cutting down an old
and well-remembered French forest I have loved; and solving all its
mystery, and laying bare the nakedness of the land in a way so
brutal and expeditious and unexpected. It reminds one of the manner
in which French market-women will pluck a goose before it's quite
dead; you bristle with indignation to see it, but you mustn't
interfere.

La Tremblaye itself had become a flourishing manufacturing town, and
to our jaundiced and disillusioned eyes everybody and everything was
as ugly as could be--and I can't say we made much of a bag in the
way of souvenirs.

We were told that young Laferte was a barrister at Angers,
prosperous and married. We deliberated whether we would hunt him up
and talk of old times. Then we reflected how curiously cold and
inhospitable Frenchmen can sometimes be to old English friends in
circumstances like these--and how little they care to talk of old
times and all that, unless it's the Englishman who plays the host.

Ask a quite ordinary Frenchman to come and dine with you in London,
and see what a genial and charming person he can be--what a quick
bosom friend, and with what a glib and silver tongue to praise the
warmth of your British welcome.

Then go and call on him when you find yourself in Paris--and you
will soon learn to leave quite ordinary Frenchmen alone, on their
own side of the Channel.

Happily, there are exceptions to this rule!

Thus the sweet Laferte remembrance, which had so often come back to
me in my dreams, was forever spoiled by this unlucky trip.

It had turned that leaf from the tablets of my memory into a kind of
palimpsest, so that I coul