don’t lose heart—keep on through the gate, take a dozen steps into the court-yard and look about, and if you have any red corpuscles left in your veins you will get a thrill that will take your breath away. Spread out before you lies a flower-choked yard flanked about on three sides by a chain of moss-encrusted, red-tiled, seesaw roofs, all out of plumb. Below, snug under the eaves, runs a long go-as-you-please corridor, dodging into a dozen or more bedrooms. Below this again, as if tired out with the weight, staggers a basement from which peer out windows of stained glass protected by Spanish grills of polished iron, their leaded panes blinking in the sunshine, while in and out, up the door-jambs, over the lintels, along the rain-spouts, even to the top of the ridge-poles of the wavy, red-tiled roofs, thousands of blossoms and tangled vines are running riot.

And this is not all. Close beside you stands a fuchsia-covered, shingle-hooded, Norman well, and a little way off a quaint kiosk roofed with flowering plants, and near by a great lichen-covered bust of Louis VI, to say nothing of dozens of white chairs and settees grouped against a background of flaring reds and brilliant greens. And then, with a gasp of joy, you follow the daring flight of a giant feather-blown clematis in a clear leap from the ground, its topmost tendrils throttling the dormers.

Even then your surprises are not over. You have yet to come in touch with the real spirit of the Inn, and be introduced to our jewel of a dining-room, the “Marmouset,” opening flat to the ground and hidden behind a carved oaken door mounted in hammered iron: a low-ceilinged, Venetian-beamed room, with priceless furniture, tapestries, and fittings—chairs, tables, wainscoting of carved oak surmounted by Spanish leather; quaint andirons, mirrors, arms, cabinets, silver, glass, and china; all of them genuine and most of them rare, for Lemois, our landlord, has searched the Continent from end to end.

Yes!—a great inn this inn of William the Conqueror at Dives, and unique the world over. You will be ready now to believe all its legends and traditions, and you can quite understand why half the noted men of Europe have, at one time or another, been housed within its hospitable walls, including such exalted personages as Louis XI and Henry IV—the latter being the particular potentate who was laid low with a royal colic from a too free indulgence in the seductive oyster—not to mention such rare spirits as Molière, Dumas, George Sand, Daubigny, as well as most of the litterateurs, painters, and sculptors of France, including the immortal Grèvin, many of whose drawings decorate the walls of one of the garden kiosks, and whose apartment still bears his name.

And not only savants and men of rank and letters, but the frivolous world of to-day—the flotsam and jetsam of Trouville, Houlgate, and Cabourg—have gathered here in the afternoon for tea in the court-yard, their motors crowding the garage, and at night in the Marmouset when, under the soft glow of overhead candles falling on bare shoulders and ravishing toilettes, laughter and merry-making extend far into the small hours. At night, too, out in the gardens, what whisperings and love-makings in the soft, starry air!—what seductive laughter and little half-smothered screams! And then the long silences with only the light of telltale cigarettes to mark their hiding-places!

All summer this goes on until one fine morning the most knowing, or the most restless, or the poorest of these gay birds of passage (the Inn is not a benevolent institution) spreads its wings and the flight begins. The next day the court is empty, as are all the roosting-places up and down the shore. Then everybody at the Inn takes a long breath—the first they have had for weeks.

About this time, too, the crisp autumn air, fresh from the sea, begins to blow, dulling the hunger for the open. The mad whirl of blossoms no longer intoxicates. Even the geraniums, which have flamed their bravest all summer, lose their snap and freshness; while the blue and pink hydrangeas hang their heads, tired out with nodding to so many passers-by: they, too, are paying the price; you can see it in their faces. Only the sturdy chrysanthemums are rejoicing in the first frost, while the more daring of the roses are unbuckling their petals ready to fight their way through the perils of an October bloom.

It is just at this blessed moment that I move in and settle down with my companions, for now that the rush is over, and the little Normandy maids and the older peasant women who have served the hungry and thirsty mob all summer, as well as two of the three French cooks, have gone back to their homes, we have Leà, Mignon, and Pierre all to ourselves.

I put dear old Leà first because it might as well be said at once that without her loving care life at the Inn, with all its comforts, would be no life at all—none worth living. Louis, the running-water painter, known as the Man in High-Water Boots—one of the best beloved of our group—always insists that in the days gone by Leà occupied a pedestal at the main entrance of the twelfth-century church at the end of the street, and is out for a holiday. In proof he points out the empty pedestal set in a niche, and has even gone so far as to pencil her name on the rough stone.

Mignon, however, he admits, is a saint of another kind—a dainty, modest, captivating little maid, who looks at you with her wondering blue eyes, and who is as shy as a frightened gazelle. There is a young fisherman named Gaston, a weather-tanned, frank, fearless fellow who knows all about these eyes. He brings the fish to the Inn—those he catches himself—and Mignon generally manages to help in their unpacking. It is not a part of her duty. Her special business is to make everybody happy; to crack the great white sugar-loaf into bits with a pair of pincers—no machine-made dominoes for Lemois—and to turn the coffee-roaster—an old-fashioned, sheet-iron drum swinging above a brazier of hot coals—and to cool its contents by tossing them in a pan—much as an Egyptian girl winnows wheat. It is a pity you never tasted her coffee, served in the garden—old Leà on the run with it boiling-hot to your table. You might better have stopped what you were doing and taken steamer for Havre and the Inn. You would never have regretted it.

Nor would you even at this late hour regret any one of the dishes made by Pierre, the chef. And now I think of it, it is but fair to tell you that if you repent the delay and show a fit appreciation of his efforts, or come properly endorsed (I’ll give you a letter), he may, perhaps, invite you into his kitchen which I have just vacated, a place of such various enticing smells from things baking, broiling, and frying; with unforgettable, appetizing whiffs of burnt sugar, garlic, fine herbs, and sherry, to say nothing of the flavors of bowls of mayonnaise, heaps of chopped onions, platters of cream—even a basket of eggs still warm from the nest—that the memory of it will linger with you for the rest of your days.

Best of all at this season, we have quite to ourselves that prince of major-domos, our landlord, Lemois. For as this inn is no ordinary inn, this banquet room no ordinary room, and this kitchen no ordinary kitchen, so, too, is Monsieur Lemois no ordinary landlord. A small, gray, gently moving, low-voiced man with thoughtful, contented face, past the prime of life; a passionate lover of animals, flowers, and all beautiful things; quick of temper, but over in a moment; a poet withal, yet a man with so quaint a humor and of so odd a taste, and so