“I have read a romance called The Tower of Montlhery" said Josephine.

“And that tower—­that historical and interesting tower—­is still standing!  How delightful to wander among the ruins—­to recall the stirring events which caused it to be besieged in the reign of—­of either Louis the Eleventh, or Louis the Fourteenth; I don’t remember which, and it doesn’t signify—­to explore the picturesque village, and ramble through the adjoining woods of St. Genevieve—­to visit...”

“I wonder if we shall find any donkeys to ride,” interrupted Josephine, upon whom my eloquence was taking the desired effect.

“Donkeys!” I exclaimed, drawing, I am ashamed to say, upon my imagination.  “Of course—­hundreds of them!”

“Ah, ca!  Then the sooner we go the better.  Stay, I must just lock my door, and leave word with my neighbor on the next floor that I am gone out for the day,”

So she locked the door and left the message, and we started.  I was fortunate enough to find a close cab at the corner of the marche—­she would have preferred an open one, but I overruled that objection on the score of time—­and before very long we were seated in the cushioned fauteuils of a first-class compartment on the Orleans Railway, and speeding away towards Montlhery.

It was with no trifling sense of relief that I found the place really picturesque, when we arrived.  We had, it is true, to put up with a comfortless drive of three or four miles in a primitive, jolting, yellow omnibus, which crawled at stated hours of the day between the town and the station; but that was a minor evil, and we made the best of it.  First of all, we strolled through the village—­the clean, white, sunny village, where the people were sitting outside their doors playing at dominoes, and the cocks and hens were walking about like privileged inhabitants of the market-place.  Then we had luncheon at the auberge of the “Lion d’Or.”  Then we looked in at the little church (still smelling of incense from the last service) with its curious old altar-piece and monumental brasses.  Then we peeped through the iron gate of the melancholy cimetiere, which was full of black crosses and wreaths of immortelles.  Last of all, we went to see the ruin, which stood on the summit of a steep and solitary rock in the midst of a vast level plain.  It proved to be a round keep of gigantic strength and height, approached by two courtyards and surrounded by the weed-grown and fragmentary traces of an extensive stronghold, nothing of which now remained save a few broken walls, three or four embrasured loopholes, an ancient well of incalculable depth, and the rusted teeth of a formidable portcullis.  Here we paused awhile to rest and admire the view; while Josephine, pleased as a child on a holiday, flung pebbles into the well, ate sugar-plums, and amused herself with my pocket-telescope.

“Regardez!” she cried, “there is the dome of the Pantheon.  I am sure it is the Pantheon—­and to the right, far away, I see a town!—­little white houses, and a steeple.  And there goes a steamer on the river—­and there is the railway and the railway station, and the long road by which we came in the omnibus.  Oh, how nice it is, Monsieur Basil, to look through a telescope!”