All other sounds, however, melt into a harmonious murmur when compared to the one great speciality of the village,—­stone-cutting in the open streets.  Whenever one of the picturesque old houses is crumbling into utter decay, a pile of stone is dumped before it, and the easy-going masons of Amboise prepare to patch up its walls.  No particular method is observed, the work progresses after the fashion of a child’s block house, and the principal labour lies in dividing the lumps of stone.  This is done with a rusty old saw pulled slowly backward and forward by two men, the sound produced resembling a succession of agonized shrieks.  It goes on for hours and hours, with no apparent result except the noise; while a handsome boy, in a striped blouse and broad blue sash, completes the discord by currying the stone with an iron currycomb,—­a process I have never witnessed before, and ardently hope never to witness again.  If one could imagine fifty school-children all squeaking their slate pencils down their slates together,—­who does not remember that blood-curdling music of his youth?—­one might gain some feeble notion of the acute agony induced by such an instrument of torture.  Agony to the nervous visitor alone; for the inhabitants of Amboise love their shrieking saws and currycombs, just as they love their shrieking parrots and cockatoos.  They gather in happy crowds to watch the blue-sashed boy, and drink in the noise he makes.  We drink it in, too, as he is immediately beneath our windows.  Then we look at the castle walls glowing in the splendour of the sunset, and at the Loire sweeping in magnificent curves between the grey-green poplar trees; at the noble width of the horizon, and at the deepening tints of the sky; and we realize that a silent Amboise would be an earthly Paradise, too fair for this sinful world.

The Chill of Enthusiasm

“Surtout, pas de zele.”—­TALLEYRAND.

There is no aloofness so forlorn as our aloofness from an uncontagious enthusiasm, and there is no hostility so sharp as that aroused by a fervour which fails of response.  Charles Lamb’s “D—­n him at a hazard,” was the expression of a natural and reasonable frame of mind with which we are all familiar, and which, though admittedly unlovely, is in the nature of a safeguard.  If we had no spiritual asbestos to protect our souls, we should be consumed to no purpose by every wanton flame.  If our sincere and restful indifference to things which concern us not were shaken by every blast, we should have no available force for things which concern us deeply.  If eloquence did not sometimes make us yawn, we should be besotted by oratory.  And if we did not approach new acquaintances, new authors, and new points of view with life-saving reluctance, we should never feel that vital regard which, being strong enough to break down our barriers, is strong enough to hold us for life.