Excerpt from Makers of Song The hamlet of Moustier Ventadour may still be seen. A league and a half east of Egletons it is, and the ruins of the Castle are a quarter of a mile farther on. The ruins of Ventadour! It is as sorrowful an image as that of faded roses or dead youth: alas, that even Ventadour should have known the destructive touch of time! But at the period of which I write, - the early half of the twelfth century, - it was a splendid pile set high upon a hill, in a country of wild and picturesque beauty. Crowding about the stone walls, every kind of tree possible to Provencal soil lifted its heavy leafage to the warm blue sky, and afforded nesting-space to the swallows and nightingales, the ring-doves and larks, that made that region melodious. 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.