going out to work, and one of the picturesque sights of the sunset hour is the procession of the powerful Percherons, their drivers sitting sideways on their broad backs, plodding into the village, both horses and farmers with an inimitable air of leisurely philosophy; of having done a good day's work and letting it go at that; of attempting no last nervous whack at the accumulated pile of things to be done which always lies before every one; with an unembittered acceptance of the facts that there are but twenty-four hours in every day and that it is good to spend part of them eating savory hot soup with one's family. According to temperament, this appearance, only possible, apparently, when you have lived a thousand years in the same place, enormously reposes or enormously exasperates the American observer.

You do not see the cows going out to pasture, or coming back at night through the village streets, because those farmers who have a dairy live on the outskirts of the town, with their big square courtyards adjacent to the fields. The biggest farmhouse of this sort in Crouy is lodged in the remnants of the medieval castle of the old seigneurs (symbol of modern France!) where at night the cows ramble in peaceably through the old gate where once the portcullis hung, and stand chewing their cud about the great courtyards whence marauding knights in armor once clattered out to rob.

Of course this arrangement whereby country folk all live in villages turns inside out and upside down most of those conditions which seem to us inevitable accompaniments of country life; for instance, the isolation and loneliness of the women and children. There is no isolation possible here, when, to shake hands with the woman of the next farm, you have only to lean out of your front window and have her lean out of hers, when your children go to get water from the fountain along with all the other children of the region, when you are less than five minutes' walk from church and the grocery-store, when your children can wait till the school-bell is ringing before snatching up their books to go to school.

You do not have to wait for your mail till some one can go to town or till the R. F. D. man brings it around six hours after it has arrived in town. The village mail-carrier brings it to you directly it arrives, just as though you lived in a city. You do not have to wait for your community news till it filters slowly to your remote door by the inaccurate medium of the irresponsible grocery-boy. The moment anything of common interest happens, the town crier walks up your street. At the sound of his announcing drum or bell you drop your work, stick your head out of your door, and hear at once, hot off the griddle, as soon as any one, that there will be an auction of cows at the Brissons on Saturday next, that poor sick old Madame Mantier has at last passed away, or that school reopens a week from Monday and all children must be ready to go. And if one of the children breaks his arm, or if a horse has the colic, or your chimney gets on fire, you do not suffer the anguished isolation of American country life. The whole town swarms in to help you, in a twinkling of an eye. In fact, for my personal taste, I must confess that the whole town seemed only too ready to swarm in, on any friendly pretext at all. But then, I have back of me many generations of solitary-minded farmer ancestors, living sternly and grimly to themselves, and not a thousand years of really sociable community life.

"But if they are country-people who live in these dry-looking villages," asked our American Ambulance boys, "what makes them huddle up so close together and run the houses into one long wall of buildings that look like tenement-houses? Why don't they have nice front yards like ours, with grass and flowers, and people sitting on the front porch, enjoying life? You can go through village after village here and never see a thing but those ugly, stony streets and long, high, stone walls, and bare, stony houses, and never a soul but maybe an old woman with a gunny sack on her back, or a couple of kids lugging water in a pail."

The best answer to that was to open the door into our own bare, stone house, which, like all the others on the street, presented to the public eye an unalluring, long, gray-white, none-too-clean plastered wall, broken by square windows designed for utility only. The big door opening showed a stone-paved corridor leading straight to what seemed at first glance an earthly Paradise of green; an old, old garden with superb nut-trees, great flowering bushes, a bit of grass, golden graveled paths, and high old gray walls with grapevines and fruit-trees carefully trained against them.

Our American visitor stared about him with dazzled eyes. "What a heavenly place! But who ever would have guessed such a garden was in Crouy!"

"Oh, but this is not one of the really good gardens of the town," we assured him. "This is a poor old neglected one compared with those all around us."

"But where are they?" asked our American incredulously, his vision cut off by the ten-foot wall.

At this we invited him upstairs to a lofty window at the back of the house, leaning from which he had a totally new view of the town whose arid gray streets he had traversed so many times. Back of every one of these gray-white, monotonously aligned plastered houses stretched a garden, often a very large one, always a jewel, gleaming, burnished, and ordered, with high old trees near the house, and flowers and vines; and, back of this pleasure spot, a great fertile stretch of well-kept vegetables and fruit. He stared long, our American, reconstructing his ideas with racial rapidity. On withdrawing his head his first comment was, usually:

"But for the Lord's sake, how ever do they get the money to pay for building all those miles of huge stone walls? It must cost every family a fortune."

Upon learning that those walls had stood exactly there in those very lines for hundreds of years, requiring only to be periodically kept in repair, he sank into another momentary reconstructive meditation.

Then came the inevitable American challenge, the brave new note from the New World which I always rejoiced to hear:

"But what's the point of shutting yourself up that way from your neighbors and making such a secret of your lovely garden that nobody gets any good of it but yourself? Why not open up and let everybody who goes by take pleasure in your flowers and your lawn and see the kids playing and hear them laughing?"

Of course I always went duly through the orthodox historical and social explanations. I pointed out that it was only in comparatively late times—only since that very recent event the French Revolution or the beginning of our life as a nation—that isolated houses in the fields would have been safe; that up to that time people were obliged to huddle together inside the walls of a town at night as a safeguard against having their throats cut; that an age-old habit of apprehension and precaution leaves ineradicable marks on life; and that it still seems entirely natural for French people to conceal their gardens behind ten-foot stone walls with broken bottles on top, although for generations the community life has been as peaceful as that of any drowsy New England village. But, having given this academic explanation, I went on to hazard a guess that age-old habits of fear leave behind them more than material marks, like stone walls and broken bottles. They shape and form human minds into tastes and preferences and prejudices, the uncourageous origin of which the owners of the minds are far from divining.

"You know," I said to our boy from home, "they can't understand our open villages with no fences or walls, with everybody's flowers open to everybody's view, with our pretty girls showing their fresh summer dresses and bright, sweet faces to the chance passerby as well as to the selected few who have the countersign to enter. They can't understand it, and they don't try to, for they don't like