Excerpt from The Chevaliers of France: From the Crusaders to the Marechals of Louis XIV IT wanted an hour or two perhaps of sunset, on a lowering September evening, when a small group of men and horses were assembled on an elevated knoll, commanding an exten sive view of the country, which at that period was mostly cov ered by unbroken forest although a large and seemingly much travelled road could be seen at intervals, for a distance of many miles, with here and there the dark square outlines of a church tower, or of some castellated mansion, distinctly visible above the trees, among which the causeway wandered devious. All else was wild and savage. The huge beech forest, a por tion of the great wood of Ardennes, which, little circumscribed in that day of its limits as described by the great Roman, swept off in solid masses to the eastward, to join beyond the Rhine the vaster solitudes of the Hercynian forest - clothed ievery hill and hollow for many a league around with dense and shadowy woodland. Except the line of road, and the. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.