M'Quigg spoke softly, as one should to a parent bereaved

"True," he said, "it was an unfortunate accident. We will see to it. But tell me first, what is your name, and what business brings you to the gatehouse of the Temple?'

The shifty-eyed rogue, visibly heartened by the prospect of compensatory cash, replied that his insignificant name was Liu, and his wretched occupation that of water-coolie. The gatekeeper was his cousin. He would not have dared to trouble us with this matter had he not known of the tajen's generous benevolence. It would be necessary to replace the broken coffin with a new packing-case, and that speedily.

M'Quigg gently dammed the flowing tide of words. "How much will it cost to put all things in order," he asked.

"For five dollars, thou mudbaked counterfeit of a man, I could buy your whole family. And now, since you say that the grave over yonder is yours, tell me how came you to put it on land which does not belong to you, and why did you not bury the coffin decently?" "It is common land," whined the wretch.

"And you a common rogue," retorted M'Quigg. "I have no belief in this tale of your little daughter. Nevertheless, an injury has been done, and

give you two dollars to buy a new coffin, and another one for your trouble, but only when the grave has been removed to some spot other than our ball-playing ground. And if ever another coffin appears on that ground, my friend, it will mean big trouble for you and your family, including that turtle's egg, your son, who carried my bag to-day."

'Twas an arrow shot into the air, but it struck the right spot. The native mind was obviously impressed by this foreigner's devilish perspicacity. "I will see that the grave is removed," he said.

"All right," said M'Quigg. "If it has been done when next I come, you shall have the three dollars." The scarecrow shuffled back towards the gate-house.

"Observe," said M'Quigg, "that if we had simply paid for a new coffin, the course would have rapidly become a pauper's cemetery, maintained by our charitable contributions."

As we rode out towards the Anting Gate, the oriole's evensong was throbbing with the joy of that never-never land where youth and beauty and loving-kindness abide for ever. Far overhead, like a broad arrow speeding to its mark, a phalanx of wild geese was heading for the silent places of Mongolia or Saghalien, wonderful in their mysterious purpose and disciplined precision. Slowly towards the western hills the sun was setting, splendid and serene.

ST MALO in September, full of English-speaking people, was no use to me: but the luck of the road provided me there with an introduction in my possible destination, which was the City of Angers. Barring that, I started without guidebook, without a plan, with no guiding impulse except the luck of the road and a vague purpose to drink the favourite wine of Athos in the country where it is grown. I picked Dol for my first stage, partly because I liked the name, so evidently ancient, but chiefly because it was the nearest place certain to have a hotel; also, a little, because it had a river which by my calculation ought to hold sea-trout. And so the train took me, in a state of virgin ignorance, towards the interior of Northern Brittany, travelling travelling secondclass because it is an offence against officialism to book third for so short a journey. The French are a pleasant people, but by some strange dispensation their railway system is planned, manned and administered exclusively by Prussians.

The country was flatter than Picardy-flat as the wheatgrowing plains of Beauce, but, unlike anything else I had seen in France, broken into small fields and hedged about as if it were in England.

Then after about ten miles, a great lump of ground stood up out of the plain with signs of quarrying on it: it was the Mont Dol, I learnt from my neighbours : a little farther on came another rise to our right, with a great church on top of it. That was Dol—and the church was a cathedral. In Ireland St Patrick, who got his ecclesiastical training in Gaul, set us up with three hundred and fifty bishoprics, for, as we gather, no clan or sept would let itself be bishoped from without. The same must have been true of this other Celtic country, for in my wandering I seemed to meet cathedrals everywhere, though the dioceses are lumped this many hundred years into some larger grouping. Town and station were a long way apart at Dol, as generally happens in these old towns: rail likes the plains, but fortification liked the hillock, and what I met first was a long pleasant boulevard, friendly even on that wet September evening; entirely French, but entirely usual. Next, a little square with a post-office and a war memorial; then suddenly entering the main street at right angles, I was back four or five centuries at least. Nothing in St Malo had prepared me for these quaintly gabled houses, their

dormer windows, the fantastic line of the roofs, the exquisite slating, like fish - scales, and the long lovely curve of a street which keeps the line it had when there were Prince Bishops in Dol governing a great part of Brittany. Hugo in his Quatre Vingt Treize' says that Dol is not a town but a street. The same could be affirmed of a hundred Irish places having like this about a thousand hearths; but, alas! our streets have none of that beauty. I left my kit at the Grand-Maison Hotel, which belongs of right to all this antiquity, and following my usual instinct, went to look for running water. What I reached could be hardly called running -a stagnant muddy ditch, no use to me whatever, and so I fell back on the cathedral. Here was a great rudely-constructed porch on the south side, decorated on its flanks with sculptures that puzzled me: powerful things, primitive in their simplification, yet somehow not exactly primitive in suggestion. But the light was failing, and I left it at that and went in to dinner. Since there were at that meal a couple of English tourists, and since Dol is a stoppingplace on the motor drive from St Malo to Mont St Michel, probably a great number of my readers will know that Dol and Mont Dol are inland cousins of the Mont, which rise out of flat reclaimed slobland-stranded ports like Romney and Winchelsea; and my river,

where I hoped for fishing, no more than a tidal ditch through the long miles of reclamation. These instructed persons will know also that the sculptures which puzzled me were sixteenth century work, carried out by the restorers of the cathedral in deliberate imitation of the fourteenth century roughness. I had not known that any one was self-consciously primitive so early. One thing, however, I did learn which may have escaped the passing tourist in the GrandMaison people were at cards, and when I saw a dummy hand put down and heard trumps (or no trumps) declared, I supposed it to be bridge. But all the cards under the seven were out of the pack, and the game was manille, which presumably must be one of the parents from which the supplanter of whist is descended. Very merry my elderly hostess and her friends were over it, though Mrs Battle would have thought them shamefully indifferent to the rigour of the game.

Two other matters may be recorded. The neighbourhood makes an admirable cheese, which may be bought in London, and is labelled Notre Dame du Mont-Dol. Rather like Port Salut, but better. The other concerns a notice in the cathedral by which the Archbishop of Rennes ordains that no woman shall be admitted with uncovered head. It adds that no woman who is comme il faut goes abroad except coiffée. I suppose we ordinary humans

do ill to praise and admire the sleek, glossy hair so exquisitely neat with which the young French housewife goes about the business of her household marketing. If she slipped into the church on her way home, would God really be angry?

The orthodox move after Dol would be to Mont St Michel, where, as everybody knows, the ideal omelette was made by the Mère Poulard. But the Mère Poulard is dead and her omelette is now syndicalised, and can be had in half a dozen competing establishments. Or, can it, I wonder ? Does it keep the personal touch which it must have had to earn a lady this odd immortality? What a talent! And is it utilised now in some other sphere ? And in what other sphere can heavenly omelettes be created without the breaking of eggs? Anyhow, at the little station of Dol I decided for a ticket to Rennes. That little station should not be left without a word: the station hotel extends its gardens so as to be continuous with the platform, and there are seats there in the sun where you may sit and drink your vermouth. Altogether the most welcoming friendly little station I ever did see, but the Prussian is in the ticket-office. When I went to book he told me firmly I could not travel by that train. It went to Rennes-but my journey was not long enough to allow of my going on an express. I

offered to pay second-class : that was rejected, and then I heard a voice from behind prompting me surreptitiously and in a whisper, exactly like a schoolboy in class. I asked for the name suggested. It was a place just outside Rennes : and I got it. There was the regulation: there was also the recognised means of evasionat the cost of a few sous. The French people, I fancy, accept it all as part of the training for their great natural concern of circumventing the tax-collector -in which they have no European equals.

Rennes was very bright and very well ordered, very French under the clean hard sunlight which sharpened all its contours. I liked its spacious Champ de Mars, I liked the gay little garden constructed over a tunnel where the river is bridged across for some two hundred yards in the centre of the town, and you get the long stretch of water shining each way beyond all the reds and yellows of an autumn parterre. I liked the meeting of the slow streams, Ille and Vilaine, and the general suggestion of deliberate drifting water traffic. I liked also the church of St Germain with its beautiful east window where the sixteenthcentury glass leaves so many uncoloured spaces that the whole makes you think of some celestial patchwork. I liked the shrine of St Anthony of Padua with his pleasant litany; but except that Rennes was a characteristic piece of

north-western France where the entirely modern skilfully encompasses and enshrines the old, it would be hard for me to explain why I found the place so enjoyable. Perhaps something was due to a petit vin de muscadet (said to come from Anjou, but much more like a Moselle) and a good deal to the amazingly capable and friendly waitress who kept eight or ten tables going briskly in the open air those two sunny days. But Rennes was not the kind of town I wanted to linger in; the Ille and Vilaine were manifestly not trout waters, and in the fishing-tackle shop where I gathered information, people told me that their customers generally went in the direction of Fougères. At Vitré, the junction, I heard much talk of a couronnement that was happening on this particular Saturday. My neighbours were too busy with each other for a polite stranger to interrupt, and I arrived at Fougères speculating why the town was profusely decorated and full of so vast a crowd. Multitudes of clergy and attendant troops of devout parishioners showed that the ceremony was religious. Once more the Boulevard de la Gare climbed uphill; crowds everywhere, all in black, which is the Breton way, brightened up here and there by patches of strong colour on the women's costumes. Beyond the top the road descended again and I saw the tail of a cortège passing and the crowd closing in

behind a train of violet that draped somebody or something. Just beside me a little pâtisserie had a charming window. Pleasant people there, in the middle of all their traffic, gave me instructions with my tea. In the ancient château of Fougères built on the ruins of an older fortress which Henry II. of England had smashed, was preserved a statue of the Virgin and Child, sculptured in stone by some craftsman of an even earlier day. In 1449 the English again captured and sacked the place, and flung the statue over the ramparts. Many years later it was discovered buried in the marsh and Fougères decided to do honour to Notre Dame des Marais. A crown was placed on the head of the gentle little lady, she was carried round the streets in triumph, and set finally in the church of St Sulpice which stands on the lower level near to where she was found. Each year, on the 8th of September, she and her Babe are borne in procession about the town and each year more jewels are added to crown or robe. I turned back to meet the cortège, and following it found myself plunging down a steep narrow street whose houses were many hundred years old: some had the first floor projecting over the sidewalk and strutted out on pillars of wood or stone. At the foot of the street we swung across a narrow bridge over a little river and up to the narrow gate of a huge medieval fortress; through an