THERE is not a town in all France which, in my opinion, looks better in the map than Montreuil. I own it does not look so well in the guide-book, but when you come to see it, to be sure it looks most pitifully.

There is promise of picturesqueness in a group of tumbled-down gabled houses at its entrance, and in a fine church doorway at one end of the Place where we lunched. But gables and doorway have been spared, I think, but to mislead the visitor with false hopes. The streets are lined with modern houses monstrously alike. The Grande Place is large enough to deserve its name, but as we saw it, it was forlornly empty, silent, and dull. The gaiety of Montreuil has gone with the fiddling and drum-beating of La Fleur.

Despite its disadvantages, however, in the town where our Master compounded that little matter with the sons and daughters of poverty it was our duty to be sentimental. There was no question of travellers of our means and vehicle engaging a servant to fiddle and make splatter-dashes for us, even if another La Fleur could be produced. But if beggars sent in their claims, we could at least find in them the occasion of the first public act of our charity in France. Beggars, after a fashion, we did meet; for at once an old woman—a poor tattered soul—begged we would let her grandson Jules show us the way to a restaurant; and next a hatless man followed us around the Place to implore a visit to his hotel, where his wife could “spik Inglis”—a sound perhaps as worth money as the “My Lord Angolis” that won Mr. Sterne’s last sous. But our hearts were hardened against them, as his, too, might have been against those other miserables, had he not slept off the ill-humours of his journey to Montreuil.

I think it was at Montreuil it first occurred to us that sentiment does not depend upon man’s will alone.—And so we got on our tricycle with no more ease than usual, but less, as the wind came howling over the plain to meet us.

Note.—J—— was too lazy, and said the morning was too hot to do anything but work the tricycle.