In the gardens of Louis XIV.  I gave myself to Nimes as devotee forever; and as the glories of the past slowly dawned upon me, that Past round which the King had planted his flowers and formal trees, and placed vases and statues, I wished I were a worthier worshipper at the shrine.

I think that there can be no more beautiful town in the world than Nimes in springtime.  The wind brought fairy perfumes, and lovely little green and golden puff-balls fell from the budding trees at our feet, as if they wanted to surprise us.  The fish in the crystal clear water of the old Roman baths, which King Louis tried to spoil but couldn’t, swam back and forth in a golden net of sunshine.  We two children of the twentieth century amused ourselves in attempting to reconstruct the baths as they must have looked in the first century; and the glimmering columns under the green water, now lost to the eye, now seen again, white and elusive as mermaids playing hide and seek, helped our imagination.

Far easier was it to go back to Rome in the Temple of Diana, so beautiful in ruin and so little changed except by time, as to bring to the heart a pang of mingled joy and pain, of sadness which women love and men resent—­unless they are poets.  Doves were cooing softly there, the only oracles of the temple in these days; and what they said to each other and to us seemed more mysterious than the sayings of common doves, because their ancestors had no doubt handed down much wisdom to them, from generation to generation, ever since Diana was taken seriously as a goddess, or perhaps even since the dim days when Celtic gods were reigning powers.

From the gardens we went slowly to that other temple which unthinking people and guide-books have named the Maison Carree, the most lovely temple out of Greece, and the one which has suffered most from sheer, uncompromising stupidity in modern days.  Now it rests from persecution, though it shows its scars; and I wondered dully, as I stood gazing at the Corinthian columns—­strong, yet graceful—­how so dull a copy as the Madeleine could possibly have been evolved from such perfection.

Inside in the museum was the dearest old gentleman in a tall hat, who explained to us with ingenuous pride and dignity the splendid collection of coins which he himself had given to the town.  It was easy to see that they were the immediate jewels of his soul; there was not one piece which he did not know and love as if it had been his child, though there were so many thousands that he alone could keep strict count of them.  He insisted gravely upon the superlative value of the least significant in appearance, but he could joke a little about other things than coins.  There was an old mosaic which we admired, with a faded God of Love riding a winged steed.

“L’Amour s’en va,” he chuckled, pointing to the half-obliterated figure. “N’est pas?” and he turned to me for confirmation.  “I don’t know yet,” I answered.