God save the King! 
The Queen is doing well!

Gone were the green fields of Sussex, which looked as though they had been taken in every night and brushed and dry-cleaned and then put down again in the morning.  Gone were the trees that Maxfield Parrish might have painted, so vivid were they in their burnished green-and-yellow coloring, so spectacular in their grouping.  Gone was the five-franc note which I had intrusted to a sandwich vender on the railroad platform in the vain hope that he would come back with the change.  After that clincher there was no doubt about it—­we were in La Belle France all right, all right!

Everything testified to the change.  From the pier where we landed, a small boy, in a long black tunic belted in at his waist, was fishing; he hooked a little fingerling.  At the first tentative tug on his line he set up a shrill clamor.  At that there came running a fat, kindly looking old priest in a long gown and a shovel hat; and a market woman came, who had arms like a wrestler and skirts that stuck out like a ballet dancer’s; and a soldier in baggy red pants came; and thirty or forty others of all ages and sizes came—­and they gathered about that small boy and gave him advice at the top of their voices.  And when he yanked out the shining little silver fish there could not have been more animation and enthusiasm and excitement if he had landed a full-grown Presbyterian.

They were still congratulating him when we pulled out and went tearing along on our way to Paris, scooting through quaint, stone-walled cities, each one dominated by its crumbly old cathedral; sliding through open country where the fields were all diked and ditched with small canals and bordered with poplars trimmed so that each tree looked like a set of undertaker’s whiskers pointing the wrong way.

And in these fields were peasants in sabots at work, looking as though they had just stepped out of one of Millet’s pictures.  Even the haystacks and the scarecrows were different.  In England the haystacks had been geometrically correct in their dimensions —­so square and firm and exact that sections might be sliced off them like cheese, and doors and windows might be carved in them; but these French haystacks were devil-may-care haystacks wearing tufts on their polls like headdresses.  The windmills had a rakish air; and the scarecrows in the truck gardens were debonair and cocky, tilting themselves back on their pins the better to enjoy the view and fluttering their ragged vestments in a most jaunty fashion.  The land though looked poor—­it had a driven, overworked look to it.

Presently, above the clacking voice of our train, we heard a whining roar without; and peering forth we beheld almost over our heads a big monoplane racing with us.  It seemed a mighty, winged Thunder Lizard that had come back to link the Age of Stone with the Age of Air.  On second thought I am inclined to believe the Thunder Lizard did not flourish in the Stone Age; but if you like the simile as much as I like it we will just let it stand.