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 large, laughing man that smoked enormously, had great masses of hair, and worked by night; also he delighted in the society of friends, and talked continuously. I wish he had a statue somewhere, and that they would pull down to make room for it any one of those useless bronzes that are to be found even in the little villages, and that commemorate solemn, whiskered men, pillars of the state. For surely this is the habit of the true poet, and marks the vigour and recurrent origin of poetry, that a man should get his head full of rhythms and catches, and that they should jumble up somehow into short songs of his own. What could more suggest (for instance) a whole troop of dancing words and lovely thoughts than this refrain from the Tourdenoise -

... Son beau corps est en terre Son ame en Paradis. Tu ris? Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergere, Ris, ma Bergere, tu ris.

That was the way they set to work in England before the Puritans came, when men were not afraid to steal verses from one another, and when no one imagined that he could live by letters, but when every poet took a patron, or begged or robbed the churches.

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