The valley had become more like a wide and shallow trench
than ever. The hills on either side were low and exactly even. Up the
middle of it went the river, the canal and the road, and these two
last had only a field between them; now broad, now narrow.
First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on the grass, then back
on the tow-path, I pieced out the last baking mile into Charmes, that
lies at the foot of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging
myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the noon Angelus;
nor, however tedious you may have found it to read this final effort
of mine, can you have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to walk
it; and surely between writer and reader there should be give and
take, now the one furnishing the entertainment and now the other.
The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of this name I had indeed
been thinking as I went along the last miles of that dusty and
deplorable road - that a town should be called 'Charms'.
Not but that towns, if they are left to themselves and not hurried,
have a way of settling into right names suited to the hills about them
and recalling their own fields.
