dollar” accepted from one passenger is blithely handed to another who is traveling in the opposite direction.  I discovered this fact on the occasion of my first visit to this interesting junction; and on subsequent occasions I have eaten my fill at one or another of the railway restaurants and settled the account with all the leaden money garnered up from weeks of traveling.  There is surely no dishonesty in observing the custom of a country; and Bobadilla may be treasured by all travelers as a clearing-house for counterfeit coins.

Again, in northern France, it was merely by some accident of changing trains that I discovered the lovely little town of Dol.  I found myself in Saint Malo, for obvious reasons; and I desired to go to Mont Saint-Michel, for reasons still more obvious—­Mother Poulard’s omelettes, and architecture, and the incoming of the tide.  Between them—­the map told me—­was situated Dol.  I made inquiries of the porter in the Saint Malo hotel.  He responded in English,—­the English of Ici on parle anglais.  “Dol,” said he, “is a dull place.”  He pronounced “Dol” and “dull” in precisely the same manner, and smiled at his sickly pun.  I did not like that smile; and I alighted at the town that he despised.  It was a little picture-book of a place, with many toy-like medieval houses clustered side by side around a market-place where peasants twisted the tails of cows.  I strolled to the cathedral—­and found myself mysteriously in England.  It was a manly Norman edifice, sane and reticent and strong, set in a veritable English green, with little houses round about, reminding one of Salisbury.  I entered the Cathedral; and found the nave to be composed in what is called in England the “decorated” style, and the choir to give hints of “perpendicular.”  And then I remembered, with a start, that the ancestors of all that is most beautiful in England had migrated from Normandy, and that here I was visiting them in their antecedent home.  “Saxon and Norman and Dane are we;” and all that was Norman in me reached forth with groping hands to grasp the palms of those old builders who reared this little sacrosanct cathedral in the far-off times when one dominion extended to either side of the English Channel.

It was by a similar accident—­desiring to transfer myself from Bourges to Auxerre—­that I discovered the wonderful junction-town of Nevers, which, despite the guide-books, is more interesting than either of the others.  It possesses a Gothic cathedral with an apse at either end, that looks as if two churches had collided and telescoped each other.  There is also a Romanesque church at Nevers which is just as simple and as manly as either of the famous abbeys in Caen; and a chateau with rounded towers, which once belonged to Mazarin.  But the most amusing feature of this town is that, though Bourges packs itself to bed at ten o’clock, Nevers sits blithely up till twelve, listening to music in cafes, and watching moving-pictures; and this amiable incongruity in a medieval town makes you bless that complication of the time-table which has forced you, against forethought, to stay there over night.