THE little vintage grapes were hanging thick in the sunny vineyards. There had been an unbroken stretch of fine weather, of which I had taken advantage every day, but the fairest day of all lured me down the valley to Villevenarde.

“ A.—h ! “ once cried an American girl, shaking her fist out of the railway carriage window at a village slumbering in the moonlight, “you beautiful, paletiled, gray stone town, that I gushed about when I first saw you and your likes lying in green valleys, you ’ll never deceive me any more. I know how you smell. You have manure heaps raked to your front doors, and your inhabitants eat artichokes, salade Roumaine, spinach, and other weeds, and your meat is calves’head and sheeps’-toes, and not a decent American fried potato or pot of tea can be had in all yonr borders! Sour wine is your drink, and though all the springs of the hills flow through your gutters you never know the taste of honest water.”

Villevenarde does not differ from its contemporaries. There are always a towered church, the great street with branches, and the arched gateways and pretentious houses of two or three chief men. While on the long, white, granitesmooth highway descending from the uplands between vineyards and meadows, you loved the gray town in its opal and emerald nest. On nearer approach you began to smell it, that same old reek of animal refuse which may be called the surface breath of France. There is no harm in this odor. It promises fertilization. A come-and-go sifting of its quality sometimes deludes you with the conviction that one place is less rank than another ; but let the wind rise and saturate a keen and nervous sense of smell, you are directly gasping, “ This is the worst of all.”

At the edge of Villevenarde a girl was washing by herself in what seemed to be a private pool, roofed, and, so to speak, just large enough for one; very exclusive compared with the public washingplace from which the whack of paddles resounded. She was a pretty-faced girl, all dark rosy and fresh-looking. Her big black wooden shoes, so large that they did not at all seem a part of the person, as shoes usually do, bore her up as a pedestal. It would be easy to find the way out of Villevenarde, having for landmark this rosy girl at her lone washingpool, with such structures betwixt her and the earth.

The tabac shop, where postage-stamps are always sold, was up an alley and a flight of stone steps which led into an interior that might have been painted by Teniers. There was a dim light from high windows, and a smouldering fire in the chimney, with cooking-vessels about, proclaimed the lately eaten peasant dinner.

The church was up this alley, also, — that very church which sent from the sweet mouths of its bells such music to the uplands. It was surrounded by high walls, and singularly guarded by an old woman, who protested against my entering. But the gate-latch yielded and so did the door, letting into a place of worship with nothing to distinguish it. No sooner had I knelt in the empty hollow than the door clicked again, and my old woman entered, having a young man with her, possibly as witness against me. They composed themselves upon their knees, but I am afraid none of us overflowed with devotion. They followed me out, without being otherwise troublesome, though they were probably disappointed of an expected fee. I never heard that there were relics or other sacred valuables in the church of Villevenarde which a relicless American might be tempted to steal. The unusual solicitude of this pair of wooden-shod peasants and their distrustful espionage as I turned again to the farm diverted me from my landmarks. But it is certain that the hardbeaten ribbon of highway by which I left Villevenarde looked exactly like the hard-beaten ribbon of highway by which I had entered it.

I went on, missing nothing save the girl at the washing-pool. The pool itself, indeed, was spirited away. Yet there were the hills which looked — in some enchanted way they were —the uplands of Les Buissons. The fortress-like farm lay on its spur of heights, and woods I knew well were smeared against the horizon. Pool and blanchisseuse ought to have been on my right hand going back. There had also been a shepherd with his flock, and the vineyard tower ought to appear, and the stone-breaking at Les Buissons should send its clinking down the valley. Coming nearer the transformed farm, I saw no gateway across the road, — a gateway unconnected with any fence, and barring passage without any visible purpose, but a certain landmark on the brow of the homing hill. Of course the walk back seemed longer than the walk out, but why did all these familiar things recede or dodge, and the goal stretch into far blue distances ? I began to feel lonesome and confused, and stood still, trying to rearrange my mixed localities. I could not convince myself that I had come out at the wrong end of Villevenarde, and was walking in the opposite direction from Les Buissons. The road was exactly the same, and rose as gradually among the hills to the farms. There is only one thing to do when you are lost in rural France, and that is to retrace your steps. If you try cross-paths, you enter endless mazes, as I proved to myself later. I followed the deceptive highway back into Villevenarde, again passed the church alley, turned at a certain cart and archway which sprang into sudden importance, inquired my way of groups enjoying the sunny afternoon in leisure, finally sighted the lone blanchisseuse, and so won home. And there is no doubt that if I should go to Villevenarde to-day, with the same bump of locality which has always been its owner’s pride, I should again take the wrong road up the hills. In France you are always on the highway; there seem to be no byways.

Very different would be the experience of a Frenchwoman in America, where one country road is easily distinguished from another by being just a little worse. Of course we have not had the great example of the Romans, as the Gauls had, in the making of highways. We have not had two thousand years in which to lay out and harden our paths. The buffalo, indeed, laid them out for us, and the red Indian, following him, trod them into a plain course ; but future generations will probably see them unfinished.

France, however, floundered for centuries in the mud. To see some of the Coaches of the mighty Louis’s time gives one a realizing sense of the service they had to perform. France is indebted to Napoleon for much of her solid footing. He knew the value of excellent roadbeds under marching troops.

Though all roads look alike in France, there are three kinds, national, departmental, and communal. The national road is made by government, and the departmental by departments, while two or three villages which form a commune or canton unite to maintain the various cross-tracks which intersect them. Taxes are distributed for this purpose. We are never entirely happy. France has perhaps the hest roads in the world, but she grumbles at, the burden of their support. “ Oh, it is dreadful! ” mourned a beautiful woman, doubtless reflecting what she could herself buy with the money.

“ Everything is taxed; even doors and windows. I do not mean that each window and door must pay a fixed sum, but a château or house of a certain grade is supposed to need so many openings, and is taxed accordingly.”

No trifling sum can be required to keep toll-free streets, macadamized and almost dustless, so graded and smoothed that one horse can draw a mountainous van along their surface, and to maintain them to the remotest edges of the provinces. Across the Beauce, that vast grain prairie, the perfect road-ribbons stretch at intervals. North of Noyon, where the newest thing is a fountain built the year that America was discovered, perfect thoroughfares ray off to world-old secluded villages. Everywhere a constant patrol is kept over the public work. You can trace a distant road by its double line of poplars, standing like slim plumes. Thought is taken for the irrigation of the trees, also, in a land where drought is almost unknown. A small channel, paved with stones, conducts the rainfall to a depressed basin left around the roots of each tree.

By graded I do not mean monotonously level roads. They wind up hill and down valley, but the bed is generally lifted some feet above the country surface. Red soil or clay whiteness of the north or the south is cloven by an omnipresent causeway of powdered flint. At intervals of a few kilometres along the way small stone tool-houses are set. And oblong piles of beaten stone, familiar to an American eye, are supplemented by a stranger sight, another proof of the thrift of France : cords of black blocks, pressed from coal waste, stand ready to feed the steam roller.

Wherever there is a junction of railway and French road it is the people’s thoroughfare which has the right of way. Trains pass through culverts beneath the undisturbed rider or wheelman or walker. Or, if there is a surface crossing, gates are shut and locked on each side of the dangerous track five minutes before the passing of a train, and opened directly after. Some steady old peasant is usually the gatekeeper, and he is an autocrat when he has once barred the thoroughfare ; no bribe will induce him to let you run any risk upon it. Americans, used to skipping across surface rails, with their lives, so to speak, in their teeth, are touched by all these precautions taken to save human slaughter.

The sides of a French road are kept shaven green and smooth like a lawn, except on rugged ridges like that of Fontainebleau, where one can wade from the beaten track knee-deep in fern and heather. There the natural glory of elm and oak arches is seen, making arcade beyond arcade for the traveler.

Loches upon its height has steep streets ; but so smoothly are they perfected that cochers drive over them horses attached to heavy cabs by nothing but yokes and rope traces. Even the streets of Greux and Domremy are swept like a floor. When an American sees in remote corners of the French republic these thoroughfares, cleared of litter, tended by laborers, fringed with plumed tree-tips, drained to irrigate the greenery alongside, and remembers the bottomless ways through which his countrymen flounder of an open winter or wet summer, the annual disfigurement with scrapers by which rural people work out their polltax, and the indifference of a rich nation to its bestial mire, he is filled with wrath and envy, and taxes become no consideration at all.

I lost my way a second time by consciously departing from the direct road and attempting a cross-cut on the sunset prairie. There were shadows in damp woods rising to the uplands behind the convent when I hurriedly left, and it was gloomy along a hedge where light struck most boldly on my daily walk back to the farm. A plougll-girl had gone home from her field, and all the large plateau was turning dim.

“No one will molest you in Marne,” the convent mothers had told me. “ We could not take our walks with the children so freely in every direction if these were not such gentle and harmless people.”

Comforted by that fact, but naturally wishing to reach the farm by the shortest cut, I fixed on a distant clump of trees as Les Buissons, — so easily lost to view as it sloped downhill, — and was tempted by a road stretching straight to that goal. I even remembered seeing the facteur coming over this short cut. It seemed to swerve far to the right, but the land lay open and plain, and it was as perfect as any road of them all. The primrose evening light and the witchery of that wonderful sameness played over it. I was disgusted at never having availed myself of it before. What use was there in passing the long blackberry hedge and making so many turns to come up at the front of the farm ? Indifferently I let the twilight catch me, for was not my way as clear and unambushed as the sky overhead ? But once more I lost Les Buissons, and a ghostly farm, a strange farm, stood out in its stead.

Remembering the confusion of ways at Villevenarde, I stopped in sudden terror of that deceptive road. The blurred landscape became as unfamiliar as if I had been dropped into Russia. Hedges and bushes on the left were already making darkness. If I did not want to stay out in the fields, it was time to plunge through them and fight a way to Les Buissons.

Beyond the bushes were woods, and certainly there was the very path where I had pleased myself fancying that St. Alpin walked. The road might have drawn me down into strange valleys, but those woods were a bath of darkness. How unaccountably they breathed and rustled ! Human nature could not endure it long, struggling towards thinner spots and what remained of open landscape. And here was the traitor road again, or one of its many duplicates, with a deep ditch and a high held on its opposite side.

It was now so dark that only the whiteness of sheep -fleece could be seen far away in the field. Against the sky the shepherd’s figure merely hinted itself. I crossed the gutter and climbed up to the field, letting out a call which sounded like some stranger’s apprehensive cry across the hidden land, — “ Berger ! ”

Grizzled or young, the darkness hiding everything but his kindliness, this belated angel drew near, telling me, as soon as his voice would carry sentences, that he could not make haste, he must not alarm his sheep ; they depended on him to guide them home. And when he learned that I sought the farm of Les Buissons he regretted that he dared not leave them, for their fold lay in another direction ; but he would set me right if I walked along parallel with the flock for a short distance. Timid brebis in the field and dependent American on the road, we moved with this good dim caretaker between us, until he showed me a wide grassy space through forest shadows where I must turn off toward Les Buissons.

“ Tout droit,” declared the shepherd, and I stretched my arm across the gutter to leave a franc in his hand. He said it was too much for a service not fairly rendered. How do I know that man was not a saint? His presence gave security as the holy Alpin’s would surely do, and he had no need of any franc from me, or any desire to take it. To turn my back on his benign protection and grope “tout droit” required a strong effort of the will. As soon as his encouraging voice died on the ear, I began to wonder if he meant straight ahead when he said straight, ahead. The monster darkness swallowed me.

A gleam of something like the stone farm buildings showed presently far below. The white pile was ghostly still, and had no light at a time when bougies would be burning in Les Buissons. Nothing but a breakneck strip of rock, the color of chalk, offered me passage downward. So stubborn is the mind when a landscape plays tricks upon it that I felt bound to try this dangerous descent, and steadied myself by bushes, puzzled by such an aspect of the farm, but anxious to feel its shelter again over my head.

Loosened stones fell into depths below. They admonished me of the shepherd’s charge to keep "tout droit.” He had said nothing about climbing down a cliff to Les Buissons. The shepherd was a better guide than benighted senses, so, returning to the level, I went straight forward again, until it seemed to me I must be well on the way to Epernay. Then familiar blackberry hedges appeared, edging the mass of forest. When a swell of this blackness was rounded I ran against my chair, drawn from the outdoor study into a long afternoon shadow, and forgotten there by Rene.

A little beyond the dog of Les Buissons barked, and there was the farmhouse blinking with lights. I approached at right angles to the track which would have brought me home if I had not tried short cuts and wandered kilometres out of the way. Next morning I went back to the cliff, and discovered it was the vineyard tower on which I had been determined to plunge myself.

The road from Paris to Versailles, oddly, seems less perfect than many provincial ones. If the weather happens to be bad, it leaves on the carriage traveler an impression of roughness and muddiness. What it must have been when the great Louis, or, later, Marie Antoinette, floundered back and forth in coaches as clumsy as omnibuses, is easy for an American to conjecture.

The value of France’s great system of macadamized streets can hardly be estimated. Wherever Roman roads could be incorporated into the modern it has been done. It is probable, taxes or no taxes, that the nation would part with many another precious thing before it would let these highways fall to decay.

I once saw an English laborer, between Leamington and Stratford - on - Avon, sweeping the road with a besom, until no dust was left to be moistened by rainfall ; and I thought of ankle-deep winter slush on Broadway, of snow which accumulates so quickly in Boston’s narrow streets, and the broad muddy crossings of Chicago. The people of the Old World have not long been perfectly served by these arteries of travel. Last century saw England a quagmire in many places. The early part of this century found matters no better. Of all civilized countries, the United States continues to maintain the most savage highways.

Orleans, after a rainfall, is as clean as a fresh-washed dish, and you will scarcely stain a sandal in the crooked streets of Tours. The cleaning and flushing of Paris have been noticed by every traveler. It cost the Old World many plagues to learn the lesson of good national housekeeping; but no scrap of paper, or heap of dust, or litter of animal refuse is now left unnoticed on its tracks.

One other French road, for which no taxes had ever been levied, I saw on my journey from the farm back to the convent. It was the day before .St. Alpin’s feast, bleak and stormy. The Sister, coming with Frizette and the donkey-cart to carry me, drew up at the door-stone of the farmhouse. The rain beat heavily upon us as we turned from the warm kitchen where madame and Rend and the housed patron stood bowing their adieux ; but the Sister, while executing the orders of her superior, merely laughed at our discomfort. She led the little donkey away from the front of Les Buissons, down a soaked path which passed through a hollow and up betwixt drenching bushes. Her shoes trod the wet green lnzerne of the field we entered as calmly as if that had been the chapel floor. Then we took a ploughman’s track.

“ Dépêche - toi, Fri-Fri,” she said, climbing to her seat, and the tiny beast trotted across that unsheltered open. Storm-driven and laughing, we dashed in our two - wheeled chariot from the exposed plain where an umbrella was blown wrong side out to a forest lane where it caught on overhanging branches. We raced running water down this gullied channel, and finally crossed the head of the park lake. Frizette’s hoofs beat grass and moss beside that village of hollied and ivy-twined playhouses in the woods which the children called their Crusoes : and when we came to the rear of the convent, through an archway and around to the alighting - place betwixt glass corridor and fountain. I felt that I had just traversed one of the prettiest roads in France.

Mary Hartwell Catherwood.