Yes! the same golden peace that lies like a charm across every page of his greatest poem lay across that sun-steeped, fertile plain, with its walls of cypress trees, its lines of poplars, its delicate, tapestry-like designs of almond trees in blossom, on a sombre background of formal olive orchards, its green meadows, lit up with singing water-courses, or gleaming irrigation canals, starred here and there with the awakening kingcup, or sweet with the returning violet—­here and there a farmhouse ("mas,” as they call them in Provence) snugly sheltered from the mistral by their screens of foliage—­and far aloft in the distance, floating like a silver dream, the snow-white shoulder of Mont Ventoux—­the Fuji Yama of Provence.

At last the old, time-worn village came in sight—­it lies about ten miles north-east of Tartarin’s Tarascon—­and we entered it, as was proper, with the “Master’s” words on our lips:  “Maillane is beautiful, well-pleasing is Maillane; and it grows more and more beautiful every day.  Maillane is the honour of the countryside, and takes its name from the month of May.

“Who would be in Paris or in Rome?  Poor conscripts!  There is nothing to charm one there; but Maillane has its equal nowhere—­and one would rather eat an apple in Maillane than a partridge in Paris.”

It was Sunday afternoon, and the streets were full of young people in their Sunday finery, the girls wearing the pretty Arlesien caps.  At first sight of us, with our knapsacks, they were prepared to be amused, and saucy lads called out things in mock English; but when it was understood that we were seeking the house of the “Master” we inspired immediate respect, and a dozen eager volunteers put themselves at our service and accompanied us in a body to where, at the eastern edge of the village, there stands an unpretentious square stone house of no great antiquity, surrounded by a garden and half hidden with trees.

We stood silently looking at the house for a few minutes, trying to realize that there a great poet had gone on living and working, in single-minded devotion to his art and his people, for full fifty years—­there in that green, out-of-the-way corner of the world.  The idea of a life so rooted in contentment, so continuously happy in the lifelong prosecution of a task set to itself in boyhood, and so independent of change, is one not readily grasped by the hurrying American mind.

Then we pushed open the iron gate and passed into the garden.  A paved walk led up to the front door, but that had an unused look, and, gaining no response there, we walked through a shrubbery around the side of the house, and as we turned the corner came on what was evidently the real entrance, facing a sunny slope of garden where hyacinths and violets told of the coming of spring.  Here we were greeted by some half a dozen friendly dogs, whose demonstrations brought to the door a neat little, keen-eyed peasant woman, with an expression in her face that suggested