NEW YORK, _October g, 1889_.
MY DEAR MR. CLEMENS: The slipper the long letter and all the rest came
this afternoon, I think they are splendid and shall have them framed and
keep them among my very most prechus things. I have had a great many
nice things given to me and people often say very pleasant things but I
am not quite shure they always mean it or that they are as trustable as
you and “Leo” and I am very shure thay would not spend their prechus
time and shed their blood for me so you see that is one reason why I
will think so much of it and then it was all so funny to think of two
great big men like you and “little Willie” (that is what “Leo” calls
himself to me) imbroidering a pair of slippers for a little girl like me
of corse you have a great many large words in your letter that I do not
quite understand. One word comencing with P. has fifteen letters in it
and I do not know what you mean by pooled unless you mean you and Leo
put your two minds together to make the slippers which was very nice of
you both I think you are just right about the angle worms thay did look
like that this summer when I used to dig them for bate to fish with
please tell Dr. Root I will think of him when I look at the part he did
the Surgicle Stich I mean I hope you will be quite well and strong by
the time you get this letter as you were before you made my slipper it
would make me very sad if you were to be ill. Give my love to Mrs.
Clemens Susie Clara Gene I-know and you-know and Vix and all of my
Hartford friends tell Gene I wish I was with her and we would have a
nice jump in the hay loft. When you come to New York you must call and
see me then we will see about those big words my address is up in the
top left corner of this letter.
To my loyal friend
Mark Twain
From his little friend
ELSIE LESLIE LYDE.
[Not Little Lord Fauntleroy now, but Tom Canty of Offal Court and Little
Edward of Wales.][2]
-----
Footnote 1:
William Gillette, the distinguished actor and playwright.
Footnote 2:
Elsie Leslie, then a little girl, played Little Lord Fauntleroy and
the double part of Tom Canty and the Little Prince, with great
success.
AIX, THE PARADISE OF THE
RHEUMATICS
(Contributed to the New York _Sun_, 1891)
Aix-les-Bains. Certainly this is an enchanting place. It is a strong
word, but I think the facts justify it. True, there is a rabble of
nobilities, big and little, here all the time, and often a king or two;
but as these behave quite nicely and also keep mainly to themselves,
they are little or no annoyance. And then a king makes the best
advertisement there is, and the cheapest. All he costs is a reception at
the station by the mayor and the police in their Sunday uniforms,
shop-front decorations along the route from station to hotel, brass band
at the hotel, fireworks in the evening, free bath in the morning. This
is the whole expense; and in return for it he goes away from here with
the broad of his back metaphorically stenciled over with display ads.,
which shout to all nations of the world, assisted by the telegraph:
Rheumatism routed at Aix-les-Bains!
Gout admonished, Nerves braced up!
All diseases welcomed, and satisfaction given or the money returned at
the door!
We leave nature’s noble cliffs and crags undefiled and uninsulted by the
advertiser’s paint brush. We use the back of a king, which is better and
properer and more effective, too, for the cliffs stay still and few see
it, but the king moves across the fields of the world and is visible
from all points, like a constellation. We are out for kings this week,
but one will be along soon--possibly His Satanic Majesty of Russia.
There’s a colossus for you! A mysterious and terrible form that towers
up into unsearchable space and casts a shadow across the universe like a
planet in eclipse. There will be but one absorbing spectacle in this
world when we stencil him and start him out.
This is an old valley, this of Aix, both in the history of man and in
the geological records of its rocks. Its little lake of Bourget carries
the human history back to the lake dwellers, furnishing seven groups of
their habitations, and Dr. William Wakefield says in his interesting
local guide that the mountains round about furnish “Geographically, a
veritable epitome of the globe.” The stratified chapters of the earth’s
history are clearly and permanently written on the sides of the roaring
bulk of the Dent du Chat, but many of the layers of race, religion, and
government which in turn have flourished and perished here between the
lake dweller of several thousand years ago and the French republican of
to-day, are ill defined and uninforming by comparison. There are several
varieties of pagans. They went their way, one after the other, down into
night and oblivion, leaving no account of themselves, no memorials. The
Romans arrived 2,300 years ago, other parts of France are rich with
remembrances of their eight centuries of occupation, but not many are
here. Other pagans followed the Romans. By and by Christianity arrived,
some 400 years after the time of Christ. The long procession of races,
languages, religions, and dynasties demolished one another’s records--it
is man’s way always.
As a result, nothing is left of the handiwork of the remoter inhabitants
of the region except the constructions of the lake dwellers and some
Roman odds and ends. There is part of a small Roman temple, there is
part of a Roman bath, there is a graceful and battered Roman arch. It
stands on a turfy level over the way from the present great bath house,
is surrounded by magnolia trees, and is both a picturesque and
suggestive object. It has stood there some 1,600 years. Its nearest
neighbor, not twenty steps away, is a Catholic church. They are symbols
of the two chief eras in the history of Aix. Yes, and of the European
world. I judge that the venerable arch is held in reverent esteem by
everybody, and that this esteem is its sufficient protection from
insult, for it is the only public structure I have yet seen in France
which lacks the sign, “It is forbidden to post bills here.” Its neighbor
the church has that sign on more than one of its sides, and other signs,
too, forbidding certain other sorts of desecration.
The arch’s nearest neighbor--just at its elbow, like the church--is the
telegraph office. So there you have the three great eras bunched
together--the era of War, the era of Theology, the era of Business. You
pass under the arch, and the buried Cæsars seem to rise from the dust of
the centuries and flit before you; you pass by that old battered church,
and are in touch with the Middle Ages, and with another step you can put
down ten francs and shake hands with Oshkosh under the Atlantic.
It is curious to think what changes the last of the three symbols stand
for; changes in men’s ways and thoughts, changes in material
civilization, changes in the Deity--or in men’s conception of the Deity,
if that is an exacter way of putting it. The second of the symbols
arrived in the earth at a time when the Deity’s possessions consisted of
a small sky freckled with mustard-seed stars, and under it a patch of
landed estate not so big as the holdings of the Tsar to-day, and all His
time was taken up in trying to keep a handful of Jews in some sort of
order--exactly the same number of them that the Tsar has lately been
dealing with in a more abrupt and far less loving and long-suffering
way. At a later time--a time within all old men’s memories--the Deity
was otherwise engaged. He was dreaming His eternities away on His Great
White Throne, steeped in the soft bliss of hymns of praise wafted aloft
without ceasing from choirs of ransomed souls, Presbyterians and the
rest. This was a Deity proper enough to the size and conditions of
things, no doubt a provincial Deity with provincial tastes. The change
since has been inconceivably vast. His empire has been unimaginably
enlarged. To-day He is a Master of a universe made up of myriads upon
myriads of gigantic suns, and among them, lost in that limitless sea of
light, floats that atom. His earth, which once seemed so good and
satisfactory and cost so many days of patient labor to build, is a mere
cork adrift in the waters of a shoreless Atlantic. This is a business
era, and no doubt he is governing His huge empire now, not by dreaming
the time away in the buzz of hymning choirs, with occasional explosions
of arbitrary power disproportioned to the size of the annoyance, but by
applying laws of a sort proper and necessary to the sane and successful
management of a complex and prodigious establishment, and by seeing to
it that the exact and constant operation of these laws is not interfered
with for the accommodation of any individual or political or religious
faction or nation.
Mighty has been the advance of the nations and the liberalization of
thought. A result of it is a changed Deity, a Deity of a dignity and
sublimity proportioned to the majesty of His office and the magnitude of
His empire, a Deity who has been freed from a hundred fretting chains
and will in time be freed from the rest by the several ecclesiastical
bodies who have these matters in charge. It was, without doubt, a
mistake and a step backward when the Presbyterian Synods of America
lately decided, by vote, to leave Him still embarrassed with the dogma
of infant damnation. Situated as we are, we cannot at present know with
how much of anxiety He watched the balloting, nor with how much of
grieved disappointment He observed the result.
Well, all these eras above spoken of are modern, they are of last week,
they are of yesterday, they are of this morning, so to speak. The
springs, the healing waters that gush up from under this hillside
village, indeed are ancient. They, indeed, are a genuine antiquity; they
antedate all those fresh human matters by processions of centuries; they
were born with the fossils of the Dent du Chat, and they have been
always abundant. They furnished a million gallons a day to wash the lake
dwellers with, the same to wash the Cæsars with, no less to wash Balzac
with, and have not diminished on my account. A million gallons a day for
how many days? Figures cannot set forth the number. The delivery, in the
aggregate, has amounted to an Atlantic. And there is still an Atlantic
down in there. By Doctor Wakefield’s calculation the Atlantic is
three-quarters of a mile down in the earth. The calculation is based
upon the temperature of the water, which is 114 degrees to 117 degrees
Fahrenheit, the natural law being that below a certain depth heat
augments at the rate of one degree for every sixty feet of descent.
Aix is handsome, and is handsomely situated, too, on its hill slope,
with its stately prospect of mountain range and plain spread out before
it and about it. The streets are mainly narrow, and steep and crooked
and interesting, and offer considerable variety in the way of names; on
the corner of one of them you read this: “Rue du Puits d’Enfer” (“Pit of
Hell Street”). Some of the sidewalks are only eighteen inches wide; they
are for the cats, probably. There is a pleasant park, and there are
spacious and beautiful grounds connected with the two great pleasure
resorts, the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs. The town consists of big
hotels, little hotels, and _pensions_. The season lasts about six
months, beginning with May. When it is at its height there are thousands
of visitors here, and in the course of the season as many as 20,000 in
the aggregate come and go.
These are not all here for the baths; some come for the gambling
facilities and some for the climate. It is a climate where the field
strawberry flourishes through the spring, summer, and fall. It is hot in
the summer, and hot in earnest; but this is only in the daytime; it is
not hot at night. The English season is May and June; they get a good
deal of rain then, and they like that. The Americans take July, and the
French take August. By the 1st of July the open-air music and the
evening concerts and operas and plays are fairly under way, and from
that time onward the rush of pleasure has a steadily increasing boom. It
is said that in August the great grounds and the gambling rooms are
crowded all the time and no end of ostensible fun going on.
It is a good place for rest and sleep and general recuperation of
forces. The book of Doctor Wakefield says there is something about this
atmosphere which is the deadly enemy of insomnia, and I think this must
be true, for if I am any judge, this town is at times the noisiest one
in Europe, and yet a body gets more sleep here than he would at home, I
don’t care where his home is. Now, we are living at a most comfortable
and satisfactory _pension_, with a garden of shade trees and flowers and
shrubs, and a convincing air of quiet and repose. But just across the
narrow street is the little market square, and at the corner of that is
the church that is neighbor to the Roman arch, and that narrow street,
and that billiard table of a market place, and that church are able, on
a bet, to turn out more noise to a cubic yard at the wrong time than any
other similar combination in the earth or out of it. In the street you
have the skull-bursting thunder of the passing hack, a volume of sound
not producible by six hacks anywhere else; on the hack is a lunatic with
a whip which he cracks to notify the public to get out of his way. This
crack is as keen and sharp and penetrating and ear-splitting as a pistol
shot at close range, and the lunatic delivers it in volleys, not single
shots. You think you will not be able to live till he gets by, and when
he does get by he leaves only a vacancy for the bandit who sells _Le
Petit Journal_ to fill with his strange and awful yell. He arrives with
the early morning and the market people, and there is a dog that arrives
at about the same time and barks steadily at nothing till he dies, and
they fetch another dog just like him. The bark of this breed is the twin
of the whip volley, and stabs like a knife. By and by, what is left of
you the church bell gets. There are many bells, and apparently six or
seven thousand town clocks, and as they are all five minutes
apart--probably by law--there are no intervals. Some of them are
striking all the time--at least, after you go to bed they are. There is
one clock that strikes the hour and then strikes it over again to see if
it was right. Then for evenings and Sundays there is a chime--a chime
that starts in pleasantly and musically, then suddenly breaks into a
frantic roar, and boom, and crash of warring sounds that makes you think
Paris is up and the Revolution come again. And yet, as I have said, one
sleeps here--sleeps like the dead. Once he gets his grip on his sleep,
neither hack, nor whip, nor news fiend, nor dog, nor bell cyclone, nor
all of them together, can wrench it loose or mar its deep and tranquil
continuity. Yes, there is indeed something in this air that is death to
insomnia.
The buildings of the Cercle and the Villa des Fleurs are huge in size,
and each has a theater in it, and a great restaurant, also conveniences
for gambling and general and variegated entertainment. They stand in
ornamental grounds of great extent and beauty. The multitudes of
fashionable folk sit at refreshment tables in the open air, afternoons,
and listen to the music, and it is there that they mainly go to break
the Sabbath.
To get the privilege of entering these grounds and buildings you buy a
ticket for a few francs, which is good for the whole season. You are
then free to go and come at all hours, attend the plays and concerts
free, except on special occasions, gamble, buy refreshments, and make
yourself symmetrically comfortable.
Nothing could be handier than those two little theaters. The curtain
doesn’t rise until 8.30; then between the acts one can idle for half an
hour in the other departments of the building, damaging his appetite in
the restaurants or his pocketbook in the baccarat room. The singers and
actors are from Paris, and their performance is beyond praise.
I was never in a fashionable gambling hell until I came here. I had read
several millions of descriptions of such places, but the reality was new
to me. I very much wanted to see this animal, especially the new
historic game of baccarat, and this was a good place, for Aix ranks next
to Monte Carlo for high play and plenty of it. But the result was what I
might have expected--the interest of the looker-on perishes with the
novelty of the spectacle; that is to say, in a few minutes. A permanent
and intense interest is acquirable in baccarat, or in any other game,
but you have to buy it. You don’t get it by standing around and looking
on.
The baccarat table is covered with green cloth and is marked off in
divisions with chalk or something. The banker sits in the middle, the
croupier opposite. The customers fill all the chairs at the table, and
the rest of the crowd are massed at their back and leaning over them to
deposit chips or gold coins. Constantly money and chips are flung upon
the table, and the game seems to consist in the croupier’s reaching for
these things with a flexible sculling oar, and raking them home. It
appeared to be a rational enough game for him, and if I could have
borrowed his oar I would have stayed, but I didn’t see where the
entertainment of the others came in. This was because I saw without
perceiving, and observed without understanding. For the widow and the
orphan and the others do win money there. Once an old gray mother in
Israel or elsewhere pulled out, and I heard her say to her daughter or
her granddaughter as they passed me, “There, I’ve won six louis, and I’m
going to quit while I’m ahead.” Also there was this statistic. A friend
pointed to a young man with the dead stub of a cigar in his mouth, which
he kept munching nervously all the time and pitching hundred-dollar
chips on the board while two sweet young girls reached down over his
shoulders to deposit modest little gold pieces, and said: “He’s only
funning, now; wasting a few hundred to pass the time--waiting for the
gold room to open, you know, which won’t be till after midnight--then
you’ll see him bet! He won £14,000 there last night. They don’t bet
anything there but big money.”
The thing I chiefly missed was the haggard people with the intense eye,
the hunted look, the desperate mien, candidates for suicide and the
pauper’s grave. They are in the description, as a rule, but they were
off duty that night. All the gamblers, male and female, old and young,
looked abnormally cheerful and prosperous.
However, all the nations were there, clothed richly and speaking all the
languages. Some of the women were painted, and were evidently shaky as
to character. These items tallied with the descriptions well enough.
The etiquette of the place was difficult to master. In the brilliant and
populous halls and corridors you don’t smoke, and you wear your hat, no
matter how many ladies are in the thick throng of drifting humanity, but
the moment you cross the sacred threshold and enter the gambling hell,
off the hat must come, and everybody lights his cigar and goes to
suffocating the ladies.
But what I came here for five weeks ago was the baths. My right arm was
disabled with rheumatism. To sit at home in America and guess out the
European bath best fitted for a particular ailment or combination of
ailments, it is not possible, and it would not be a good idea to
experiment in that way, anyhow. There are a great many curative baths on
the Continent, and some are good for one disease and bad for another. So
it is necessary to let your physician name a bath for you. As a rule,
Americans go to Europe to get this advice, and South Americans go to
Paris for it. Now and then an economist chooses his bath himself and
does a thousand miles of railroading to get to it, and then the local
physicians tell him he has come to the wrong place. He sees that he has
lost time and money and strength, and almost the minute he realizes this
he loses his temper. I had the rheumatism and was advised to go to Aix,
not so much because I had that disease as because I had the promise of
certain others. What they were was not explained to me, but they are
either in the following menu or I have been sent to the wrong place.
Doctor Wakefield’s book says:
We know that the class of maladies benefited by the water and baths at
Aix are those due to defect of nourishment, debility of the nervous
system, or to a gouty, rheumatic, herpetic, or scrofulous
diathesis--all diseases extremely debilitating, and requiring a tonic,
and not depressing action of the remedy. This it seems to find here,
as recorded experience and daily action can testify. According to the
line of treatment followed particularly with due regard to the
temperature, the action of the Aix waters can be made sedative,
exciting, derivative, or alterative and tonic.
The “Establishment” is the property of France, and all the officers and
servants are employees of the French government. The bathhouse is a huge
and massive pile of white marble masonry, and looks more like a temple
than anything else. It has several floors and each is full of bath
cabinets. There is every kind of bath--for the nose, the ears, the
throat, vapor baths, swimming baths, and all people’s favorite, the
douche. It is a good building to get lost in, when you are not familiar
with it. From early morning until nearly noon people are streaming in
and streaming out without halt. The majority come afoot, but great
numbers are brought in sedan chairs, a sufficiently ugly contrivance
whose cover is a steep little tent made of striped canvas. You see
nothing of the patient in this diving bell as the bearers tramp along,
except a glimpse of his ankles bound together and swathed around with
blankets or towels to that generous degree that the result suggests a
sore piano leg. By attention and practice the pallbearers have got so
that they can keep out of step all the time--and they do it. As a
consequence their veiled churn goes rocking, tilting, swaying along like
a bell buoy in a ground swell. It makes the oldest sailor homesick to
look at that spectacle.
The “course” is usually fifteen douche baths and five tub baths. You
take the douche three days in succession, then knock off and take a tub.
You keep up this distribution through the course. If one course does not
cure you, you take another one after an interval. You seek a local
physician and he examines your case and prescribes the kind of bath
required for it, with various other particulars; then you buy your
course tickets and pay for them in advance--nine dollars. With the
tickets you get a memorandum book with your dates and hours all set down
on it. The doctor takes you into the bath the first morning and gives
some instructions to the two _doucheurs_ who are to handle you through
the course. The _pourboires_ are about ten cents to each of the men for
each bath, payable at the end of the course. Also at the end of the
course you pay three or four francs to the superintendent of your
department of the bathhouse. These are useful particulars to know, and
are not to be found in the books. A servant of your hotel carries your
towels and sheet to the bath daily and brings them away again. They are
the property of the hotel; the French government doesn’t furnish these
things.
You meet all kinds of people at a place like this, and if you give them
a chance they will submerge you under their circumstances, for they are
either very glad or very sorry they came, and they want to spread their
feelings out and enjoy them. One of these said to me:
“It’s great, these baths. I didn’t come here for my health; I only came
to find out if there was anything the matter with me. The doctor told me
if there was the symptoms would soon appear. After the first douche I
had sharp pains in all my muscles. The doctor said it was different
varieties of rheumatism, and the best varieties there were, too. After
my second bath I had aches in my bones, and skull and around. The doctor
said it was different varieties of neuralgia, and the best in the
market, anybody would tell me so. I got many new kinds of pains out of
my third douche. These were in my joints. The doctor said it was gout,
complicated with heart disease, and encouraged me to go on. Then we had
the fourth douche, and I came out on a stretcher that time, and fetched
with me one vast, diversified undulating continental kind of pain, with
horizons to it, and zones, and parallels of latitude, and meridians of
longitude, and isothermal belts, and variations of the compass--oh,
everything tidy, and right up to the latest developments, you know. The
doctor said it was inflammation of the soul, and just the very thing.
Well, I went right on gathering them in, toothache, liver complaint,
softening of the brain, nostalgia, bronchitis, osteology, fits,
Coleoptera, hydrangea, Cyclopædia Britannica, delirium tremens, and a
lot of other things that I’ve got down on my list that I’ll show you,
and you can keep it if you like and tally off the bric-à-brac as you lay
it in.
The doctor said I was a grand proof of what these baths could do; said I
had come here as innocent of disease as a grindstone, and inside of
three weeks these baths had sluiced out of me every important ailment
known to medical science, along with considerable more that were
entirely new and patentable. Why, he wanted to exhibit me in his bay
window!”
There seem to be a good many liars this year. I began to take the baths
and found them most enjoyable; so enjoyable that if I hadn’t had a
disease I would have borrowed one, just to have a pretext for going on.
They took me into a stone-floored basin about fourteen feet square,
which had enough strange-looking pipes and things in it to make it look
like a torture chamber. The two half-naked men seated me on a pine stool
and kept a couple of warm-water jets as thick as one’s wrist playing
upon me while they kneaded me, stroked me, twisted me, and applied all
the other details of the scientific massage to me for seven or eight
minutes. Then they stood me up and played a powerful jet upon me all
around for another minute. The cool shower bath came next, and the thing
was over. I came out of the bathhouse a few minutes later feeling
younger and fresher and finer than I have felt since I was a boy. The
spring and cheer and delight of this exaltation lasted three hours, and
the same uplifting effect has followed the twenty douches which I have
taken since.
After my first douche I went to the chemist’s on the corner, as per
instructions, and asked for half a glass of Challe water. It comes from
a spring sixteen miles from here. It was furnished to me, but,
perceiving that there was something the matter with it, I offered to
wait till they could get some that was fresh, but they said it always
smelled that way. They said that the reason that this was so much ranker
than the sulphur water of the bath was that this contained thirty-two
times as much sulphur as that. It is true, but in my opinion that water
comes from a cemetery, and not a fresh cemetery, either. History says
that one of the early Roman generals lost an army down there somewhere.
If he could come back now I think this water would help him find it
again. However, I drank the Challe, and have drunk it once or twice
every day since. I suppose it is all right, but I wish I knew what was
the matter with those Romans.
My first baths developed plenty of pain, but the subsequent ones removed
almost all of it. I have got back the use of my arm these last few days,
and I am going away now.
There are many beautiful drives about Aix, many interesting places to
visit, and much pleasure to be found in paddling around the little Lake
Bourget on the small steamers, but the excursion which satisfied me best
was a trip to Annecy and its neighborhood. You go to Annecy in an hour
by rail, through a garden land that has not had its equal for beauty
perhaps since Eden; and certainly not Eden was cultivated as this garden
is. The charm and loveliness of the whole region are bewildering.
Picturesque rocks, forest-clothed hills, slopes richly bright in the
cleanest and greenest grass, fields of grain without freck or flaw,
dainty of color and as shiny and shimmery as silk, old gray mansions and
towers, half buried in foliage and sunny eminences, deep chasms with
precipitous walls, and a swift stream of pale-blue water between, with
now and then a tumbling cascade, and always noble mountains in view,
with vagrant white clouds curling about their summits.
Then at the end of an hour you come to Annecy and rattle through its old
crooked lanes, built solidly up with curious old houses that are a dream
of the Middle Ages, and presently you come to the main object of your
trip--Lake Annecy. It is a revelation; it is a miracle. It brings the
tears to a body’s eyes, it affects you just as all things that you
instantly recognize as perfect affect you--perfect music, perfect
eloquence, perfect art, perfect joy, perfect grief. It stretches itself
out there in a caressing sunlight, and away toward its border of
majestic mountains, a crisped and radiant plain of water of the divinest
blue that can be imagined. All the blues are there, from the faintest
shoal-water suggestion of the color, detectable only in the shadow of
some overhanging object, all the way through, a little blue and a little
bluer still, and again a shade bluer, till you strike the deep, rich
Mediterranean splendor which breaks the heart in your bosom, it is so
beautiful.
And the mountains, as you skim along on the steamboat, how stately their
forms, how noble their proportions, how green their velvet slopes, how
soft the mottlings of the sun and shadow that play about the rocky
ramparts that crown them, how opaline the vast upheavals of snow banked
against the sky in the remotenesses beyond--Mont Blanc and the
others--how shall anybody describe? Why, not even the painter can quite
do it, and the most the pen can do is to suggest.
Up the lake there is an old abbey--Tallories--relic of the Middle Ages.
We stopped there; stepped from the sparkling water and the rush and boom
and fret and fever of the nineteenth century into the solemnity and the
silence and the soft gloom and the brooding mystery of a remote
antiquity. The stone step at the water’s edge had the traces of a
worn-out inscription on it; the wide flight of stone steps that led up
to the front door was polished smooth by the passing feet of forgotten
centuries, and there was not an unbroken stone among them all. Within
the pile was the old square cloister with covered arcade all around it
where the monks of the ancient times used to sit and meditate, and now
and then welcome to their hospitalities the wandering knight with his
tin breeches on, and in the middle of the square court (open to the sky)
was a stone well curb, cracked and slick with age and use, and all about
it were weeds, and among the weeds moldy brickbats that the Crusaders
used to throw at one another. A passage at the further side of the
cloister led to another weedy and roofless little inclosure beyond where
there was a ruined wall clothed to the top with masses of ivy, and
flanking it was a battered and picturesque arch. All over the building
there were comfortable rooms and comfortable beds and clean plank floors
with no carpets on them. In one room upstairs were half a dozen
portraits, dimming relics of the vanished centuries--portraits of abbots
who used to be as grand as princes in their old day, and very rich, and
much worshiped and very bold; and in the next room there were a howling
chromo and an electric bell. Downstairs there was an ancient wood
carving with a Latin word commanding silence, and there was a spang-new
piano close by. Two elderly French women, with the kindest and honestest
and sincerest faces, have the abbey now, and they board and lodge people
who are tired of the roar of cities and want to be where the dead
silence and serenity and peace of this old nest will heal their
blistered spirits and patch up their ragged minds. They fed us well,
they slept us well, and I wish I could have stayed there a few years and
got a solid rest.