this fair spot builded better than he knew, for when sullen clouds were beginning to foretell direful storms for France, he planned and wrought into artistic completeness just the home which more than a century later would realize the ideal that an artistic household would cross the sea to seek. The picturesque, rambling roof and pointed gables, with the conventional panel borders and cornices of scroll and foliage of the manor, mark the period when Madame Pompadour was the protecting divinity of fashionable art, when Boucher was her chief prophet, and when Soufflot reared bulging and florid domes to dominate the roofs of Paris.

In the low, spacious upper rooms massive carvings seem to wave and wimple in delicate, sinuous lines whenever the fire-light dances upon the deep, tiled hearth. Rich, mellow atmospheres pervade these chambers,

In the grand salon a shining floor reflects the crimson and gold of straightbacked chairs that have seen generations of men come and go,-massive, carved pieces of furniture, splendid and stately, as if every year of their many decades had dowered them with a new dignity, just ready to step out in a courtly minuet. Panels allegorical, in which are representations of the seasons, make the walls the vista of the advancing or receding year. Wide-paneled doors, unclosing like minster portals, and deep-embrasured windows, give from the outside views of interiors deep and mysterious as cathedral vistas; from the inside, glimpses of an earthly paradise.

Down in the garden is the studio, strawthatched and showing massive ribs of timber through its gray walls. Upon the inner walls hang rare old masterpieces, picked

up in odd nooks and corners of Europe, side by side with the splendors of the American Indian summer and of sunsets among the White Mountains. Normandy bits rest upon the easels, sketches and studies of picturesque cider-courts, with peasants drinking at rough tables and whispering seditious republicanism under the shadows of bending apple-boughs with a wide-roofed old barn running into a graceful mass of curves and waving lines in the foreground, and a mellow brown cider-cart yielding up its tart contents amid shifting flecks of sunshine and drifts of shadow.

Here are sketches of picturesque old curés; of white-capped Norman peasant women standing amid the Rembrandt shadows of an open door-way; of red-capped

jinks" been held as those which, during that summer, gave Discretion-in blouse and sabots, or high cap and short petticoatsreason to shake its head. Mad, indeed, must have been those Americans. For who other than lunatics would arrest peaceable peasants wending homeward from Honfleur market and wrest from them with bribes their patched and faded blue blouses? Mad of course they were, to seduce from elderly Norman heads, soberly driving donkey-charrettes through the broad highway, their tall Normandy caps, leaving in thrifty palms money enough to cap the despoiled motherly heads for evermore.

Mad, madder, maddest! For was not the whole party once known to follow Père Duval, the shepherd, over hill and dale, through ditch, brake and brier, for

ures of them after déjeuner? And then, a little later, did not Désirée Courtois come stealing timidly up the acacia-arched avenue bringing her little parcel of foulards, hoping to make as good a trade at Le Manoir as her grandmother had made for her fiftyyears'-old wedding petticoat-to be greeted by all the maniacs with a whoop and a yell, and to be also thrust down into a corner with bread, meat and wine, and threatened with hangman and headsman if she moved before she also could be put into a picture. Then, while they babbled and raved over their café noir, did not Léon Duval, the fisherman, come from under the arch of roses over the garden path, hoping to sell for as good a price as he got for his crimson barrette, the squirming crevettes in his basket? And was there not another howl and roar, and was not Léon thrust down into another corner with bread, meat and wine, under threat of summary punishment if he moved but an eyelash before his likeness could be put upon canvas. And then, as victims and mad oppressors all sat and glared at each other, did not a stray maniac, belated among the hills, come home to her late déjeuner dragging with her the little

Louise Reynault, whom she had beguiled from fagot-gathering on the hill-top, and who also was thrust into a corner and lulled to silence, for the same insane purpose.

One of the favorite rambles of the mad friends during that elysian summer was along the sea-side road for miles, past the dreary little cemetery where iron and stone crosses leaned all awry as if stooping to pick up the withered crowns which blew from their heads with every breeze; past groups of peasant women washing at way-side fountains; past farm-gates thatched with rusted gold; past the open doors of farm-houses giving glimpses of dark, dirty earthen floors, grimy walls hung thick with kitchen utensils and drying herbs, the flicker of ruddy fires upon cavernous hearths making gaudy saints and saintesses to dance unseemly jigs upon the high mantels,-thick-waisted, heavyfooted housewives moving to and fro; past the summer cots of Parisian artists contrived with timbered walls and thatched roofs to bring no note of modern dissonance into the old Norman harmony; past moss-grown wayside crosses; past hideous, colossal, dying Christs of white plaster; past faded and