The water was as blue as the sky above, and over the valley, the wooded hills, and naked rocks lay the sunshine of early autumn, tender in its strength, mingling a balm with its burning. I seemed to be floating swiftly but gently down some lovely but treacherous river of enchanted land. And where is the river that lends itself better to this illusion than the Dordogne—ever charming, changing, and luring like a capricious, fascinating, and rather wicked woman? Now it flows without a sound by the forest, where the imagination places the fairy people and the sylvan deities; now it roars in the shadow of the castle-crowned and savage rock, over which the solitary hawk circles and repeats its melancholy cry; now it seems to sleep like a blue lake in the midst of a broad, fair valley, where in the sunny fields the flocks feed drowsily.

The depth of the water was as variable as the strength of the current. Sometimes I saw the stony bed seven or ten feet below, and then quite suddenly the boat would get into rushing water that sparkled with crystal clearness over a bank of pebbles, and I expected momentarily to hear a grating noise and to feel myself aground; but the little boat went over the shallows like a leaf. I passed a bank large enough to be called an island. The water had not covered it for months, and it was all thickly overgrown with persicaria, which the late summer had stained a carmine red, so that the island was all aflame. The swallows that dipped their wings in the water, the kingfishers that flew along the banks or perched on the willow stumps, and the graceful wagtails, were for some miles my only river companions—excepting, of course, the fish, with which a treacherous current or a sunken rock might have placed me at any moment on terms of still closer intimacy.

But time flew like the boat, and I soon came in sight of a charming little village whose houses with peaked roofs seemed to have been piled one upon another. Here upon stones in the water I recognised the human form supported by two bare legs, and in the posture as of a person about to take a dive, which is not perhaps very graceful, but is one that certainly lends character to the riverside scenery of France. Two or three women were rinsing their linen.

On nearing St. Cyprien the current became swifter and the turmoil of the rapids so great that I prepared my mind here to being swamped by the waves. The question whether I would abandon or try to rescue my knapsack after the wreck was distressing. The risk being over, it was with a sigh of relief that I beached the boat, now half full of water, at the nearest spot to the small town. Having moored it and given the sculls in charge of a man whose house was close by, I was soon walking in the warm glow of the September afternoon by cottage gardens where the last flowers of summer were blooming.

The small burg of less than three thousand inhabitants which bears the name of the African saint was probably, like many others, much more important in the Middle Ages than it is now. In accordance with the building spirit of the past, so strongly pronounced throughout Aquitaine, and obviously inspired by a defensive motive, the houses are closely packed together on a steep hillside. A few ancient dwellings, notably one with a long exterior gallery, show themselves very picturesquely here and there. The town grew up at the foot of an abbey, of which the church still existing exhibits a massive tower that might easily be mistaken at a little distance for an early feudal keep. The lower part of this tower is Romanesque. The interior of the church is in the very simple pointed style of the twelfth century, but the interest has suffered much from restoration. What is chiefly remarkable here is the carved oak of the reredoses and pulpit.

The English in 1422 took the town of St. Cyprien and besieged the abbey, which was a veritable citadel where the inhabitants in the last resort found shelter. A French force coming, however, to the relief of the people, the English, who were probably not very numerous, deemed it prudent to retire.

There being still an hour or more of daylight, I continued the ascent of the hill above the houses and the solemn old church to find a certain Chteau de Pages, which I knew to be somewhere in the locality. A woman working her distaff and spindle with that meditative air which the rustic spinners so often have, her bare feet slowly and noiselessly moving over the rough stones, pointed out to me a little lane that wound up the deserted hill between briars bedecked with scarlet hips and bits of ancient wall to which ferns and moss and ivy clung, tinged by the waning golden light. I passed through vineyards from which the grapes had been gathered, then rose by broom and blackthorn to the level land.

I looked in vain for the castle. I might have searched for it until darkness came, but for the help of a boy who was taking home a goat. At length I found it lying in a hollow, a sufficient sign that it was never a stronghold. In feudal times it was probably a small castellated manor belonging perhaps to a knight who could not afford to build himself a donjon on some eminence and to fortify it with walls; but centuries later what remained of the original structure was patched up and considerably enlarged. Now, as I saw it in the dusk, it seemed a very ghost-haunted place. The building had not fallen into ruin; it was still roofed, and might easily have been made habitable; but there was no glass in the windows; all the rooms were silent with that silence so deep and sad of the long-deserted house which is not sufficiently wrecked by time and decay to have lost the pathos of human associations. The breath of the dying twilight stirred the ivy leaves upon the wall of the detached chapel where never a person had prayed for many a year, and the goblin bats came out from the shadowy places to flutter against the pale sky. Then I felt that I had lingered long enough on this desolate spot, and the thought of the awaking hearths brightening the little town with the blaze of wood made me hasten through the heather and gorse that had grown up on the grave of many a vine.

The next morning saw me afloat again. As I was getting away from the shore a man called out to me: 'Your boat is worth nothing! If you try to pass the third bridge you will go to the bottom!'

He spoke very seriously, and I wished to take further counsel of him; but having once got into the current, it carried me off at such a rate that while I was thinking of putting a question I was taken out of speaking distance. I shot through one of the arches of the first bridge, and soon found myself in water that was a little rough for my poor skiff. Here were the rapids again. I had been warned against these before I left the inn. There was no turning back now, and if the commotion of water had been ever so great I should have had to take my chance in it. The Otter's advice when I came to rapids was to pull as hard as I could in the middle of the current. I followed it, and my shallow boat, which had just been described as worthless, darted into the midst of the turmoil, and went through it all as swift as a swallow on the wing. The river, however, had risen considerably during the night, and the strength of the current having much increased in consequence, my belief in the prissoire's worthiness was not sufficient to make me run the risk of being swamped at the third bridge. I therefore landed at the next one, which was close to the village of Sorac. It seemed that I had only just started from St. Cyprien, and yet I had travelled about six miles. With the help of a willing man the boat was carried to the railway-station, which was not far off, and its journey home having been paid, I ceased for awhile to be a waterfarer, and became again a wayfarer.

Although there was not much to interest me at Siorac, I stayed there to lunch in a small inn, where an old woman grilled me a chop over the embers, and then set before me a pile of grapes, another of pears, and a third of fresh walnuts. The fruit was to me the best part of the meal, for the long hot summer had caused me to look upon meat very much as a necessary evil in the routine of life. While I was seated at the table, the old woman, who now dozed over her distaff in the chimneycorner, would start up every five minutes or so, as if from the beginning of a nightmare, and rush at the flies, which were ravenously busy upon the grapes and pears that I had set aside for them. She hated them with a hatred so fierce and bitter that I thought it rather unbecoming at her time of life.

'On ne pent rien manger,' she said, 'sans que ces diables y touchent.'

This was quite true; but it was not the flies' fault that their parents were prolific, and that they had been hatched in a climate eminently conducive to their vigour and happiness. Their numbers and their voracity showed that they, too, were compelled by the struggle for life to be active and enterprising. Unlike some beings of a higher order, they did not take this trouble sadly; but, then, they were Southern flies.

Having driven them from the table, the aged woman nodded her head with vindictive satisfaction, and murmured, 'C'est gal; elles vont bientt crever'—unmindful of the fact that she, too, had reached the season of life when the frost comes suddenly and catches people unawares.

I returned to the river and crossed the bridge. On one side of it was a high statue of the Madonna and Child, with these words on the pedestal: 'Protectrice du pont, priez pour nous..' The inscription further stated that the statue was raised in remembrance of the flood of 1866. That was in the time of the Empire; nowadays the Government despises all heavenly assistance in the department of roads and bridges, and religious statues are no longer erected in such places. Just before reaching a village called Coux, I was confronted by a very large army of geese, and while the foremost row advanced to the attack with outstretched necks and bills laid near the ground, the others cheered them on. For a minute or so matters looked very serious; then goose and gander courage failed completely, until the army worked round to my rear, when the screams of defiance arose again.

Poor wretches! their high spirits were not going to last long. They would soon have to undergo the cramming process, which a goose detests, for, unlike a pig, it will never of its own will eat more than it needs. In a few weeks the livers of most of them would be made into those excellent truffled pts de foie gras, which it is the pride and profit of Prigord to send far and wide.

A grand old elm, such as one does not often see in France, stood in front of the village church—a Transition building with a Romanesque portal. Beyond this place the land became marshy, and considerable tracts of it had been planted with Jerusalem artichokes, each of which had now its yellow head that tells its relationship to the sunflower. These artichokes are much grown by damp woodsides, and on other land of little value, in the valleys of Prigord. They are rarely used as food for man, for the French, notwithstanding the wide range of their gastronomy, including as it does squirrels and tomtits, and even snakes in certain localities, as well as various herbs and vegetables seldom or never eaten in England, have not been able to acquire a liking for the tubers of the artichoke. The plant is cultivated for feeding cattle, the whole of it doing good service in a region where there is but little grass. The multitude of golden flowers floating, as it were, on sombre green waves light up the autumnal landscape with a new flame when the skies turn gray.

A solitary man whom I found working a loom in a cottage by the side of the river kept a ferryboat, and with his help I crossed again to the other bank. Wandering on with a somewhat vague purpose, I soon found myself—now under a gray sky—on a marshy flat, which a backwater of the Dordogne had almost made an island. Here there were many low shrubs of dwarf elder covered with berries; pools, and wide ditches, where the dark water scarcely moved, all fringed with tall reeds; while here and there was the gleam of a white flower upon the erect stem of a marsh-mallow. But what gave to this spot a strange and almost weird character was the number of great hoary willows, thirty or forty feet high, with gnarled and twisted boles, scattered over the dark green grass. It was a melancholy grove of fantastic dream-haunted willows, such as belongs to the South and the Virgilian muse:

'Umbrarum hic locus est, somni noctisque soporae.'

And the sad solitude, in which there was not a sound of moving leaf or singing bird, seemed to be peopled by the ghosts of men who were waiting and weeping out their hundred years on the Stygian shore.

Hoary willows, dark alders, and then the road. This led me to Le Buisson—a place possessed of the blue devils, and which exists merely out of compliment to the railway-junction here. Having made arrangements for returning to the inn, I wandered out again to look at the river in the gray evening, and at the bridge where it was predicted that I should go to the bottom if I remained in the little boat. I crossed fields from which tobacco and maize had lately been carried, and reached the bridge of evil prophecy. The river certainly seemed to be doing its best to sweep away the piers, and when it escaped from the arches it raised its voice to a roar; but it seemed to me that on one side the prissoire would have gone through gaily without being swamped. The cry of troubled water in the dusk fascinated me. I lingered, and yet felt the strong impulse to hurry back to the society of men, out of the sound of the angry river, whose slaty waves flashed out strange gleams. What is it in the gloom and horror of nature that so draws us and yet warns us to flee? The day was ending stormily. The poplars wailed, and bent under the lash of the rising wind; dark masses of cloud stood still in the sky, whilst others, torn and scattered below them, rushed hither and thither madly. Every few minutes the faint gleam of lightning, still far off, brought to the black woods along the hills a momentary return of radiance, as though it were the fitful flashing of the day's dying lamp.

The roaring and wailing of the turbid flood now seemed to be repeating in cruel mockery the despairing cries of all the drowning people who were ever the prey of the water-fiends that draw downward in whirlpools to depths where twilight passes into darkness, and take the form of the long waving weeds that look so innocent, but whose grasp is deadly, or guide the current that utters never a sound as it seizes its victim and bears him into an unfathomed gulf under the pitiless rock. A voice within me cried 'Home!' but home had I none anywhere of the staple sort: mine was like a home on wheels.

As I returned to the inn across the fields, I saw some scattered peasant figures moving slowly the same way under the wild sky; men with the ox that was weary like themselves, women with bundles of forage on their heads—melancholy forms or phantoms in the dusky air, at one with nature in unconscious sympathy. Then across the dim and dreary plain, where the narrow path was lost to sight after the first few yards, a railway lamp flashed like the large red eye of some unimaginable monster of the primordial marsh.

In the morning I was on the road to Cadouin. The air was keen and a little frosty, for the hour was early. Men were mowing the last crop of grass, which was powdered with rime. After the meadows came the woods, for the road went south, and was therefore carried over the hills which rise above the valley of the Dordogne. The woods were mainly of chestnut, and, under the action of the storm, followed by the first frost, many a nut lay shining on the road within its gaping prickly shell. After two or three miles of ascent the road sloped downward, and it was not long before I entered a very neat and trim little town, which, however, was altogether village-like. This was Cadouin, and in the centre stood its venerable Romanesque church. I entered the building, which was silent and very dim; not a soul was there but myself. Presently there was a moan in the tower, which seemed so far away: the clock was striking one of the quarters. Now the dim light brightened suddenly, for the sun had risen high enough to dart its rays through a window, and to flash upon a column the brilliant colours of the glass. With the exception of the apse, which is purely Romanesque, the interior of this church is Gothic of the Transition; but most of the capitals of the pier-columns have a plain Romanesque outline. There is no clerestory, the light being admitted from small round-headed windows in the aisle walls. Much of the building dates from the foundation of the abbey of Cadouin, in the early part of the twelfth century; but the existing cloisters, which are what is most remarkable here, date from the fifteenth century, and owe much of their interest to the partial transformation of their style which they afterwards underwent when the spirit of the Renaissance set in. The Gothic tracery of the arches that face the quadrangle unites the strength of stone with the delicacy of pencil drawing. In the late Gothic and Renaissance part, the ceilings are richly and floridly groined, angelic and other figures forming the termination of the low-reaching bosses, the groins converging in fan-like order towards elaborately-carved canopies against the wall. At one end of this wing is a doorway, the jambs and lintels of which are heavily over-worked with carvings very typical of the exuberant fancy of the early French Renaissance.



For centuries Cadouin was a famous place of pilgrimage, in consequence of the claim laid by the abbey to the possession of the Holy Shroud. The following is the history of the celebrated relic, according to Jean Tarde:

'In the year 1100 Hugh, surnamed the Great, brother of the King of France, and Bishop of Le Puy, in Auvergne, having gone on a voyage beyond the seas with Godefrey de Bouillon, found means, after the taking of Jerusalem, to recover this holy relic, and, dying in Palestine, he left it in charge of a priest, his chaplain. The priest falling ill on board ship, and perceiving that his end was drawing near, gave the shroud into the hands of a clerk, a native of Prigord. He, after the death of his master, took a small barrel, in the middle of which he placed a partition. In one half he put the sacred sheet, and his drink in the other. In this manner he carried the relic back to his native land, and placed it in a church near Cadouin, of which he had charge. Fearing that someone might steal his treasure, he left it in the barrel, which he put away in a chest near the altar, showing it only to a few of the monks of Cadouin. But one day, while he was absent, fire broke out and gained the whole village. All that was in the church was consumed, excepting the chest that contained the barrel. The monks of Cadouin, informed of the fire, hastened to the spot, and, having broken open the chest, took away the barrel, and carried it to their own church. The clerk, on his return, asked for what had been taken from him; but the monks said that, inasmuch as they had risked their lives in saving it from the flames, it belonged to them. The difference was arranged in this wise: the clerk was received as a religious, and the keeping of the relic was entrusted to him during his lifetime. He himself thought it safer there than in a rural church.'

In 1392, when the country was distracted by the dynastic wars between the crowns of France and England, the Holy Shroud was taken for safety to Toulouse. Subsequently, the people of Prigord wished to have it replaced at Cadouin, and the Abbot and Chapter of St. Etienne at Toulouse resisting, much litigation ensued. In 1455 some monks of Cadouin took it away by stealth, and brought it back to their abbey. Tarde mentions, among other circumstances which tended to increase the importance of the abbey of Cadouin, 'les bienfaietz d'une reyne d'Angleterre'.

Had it not been for other plans, I should have continued my journey southward from Cadouin as far as the Chteau de Biron, one of the most instructive relics of the past in Prigord, and have taken on my way Modires, one of the English bastides which Edward I. farmed for ten years; but I made my way back to the Dordogne, with the intention of ascending the valley of its tributary the Vzre. I did not, however, return to Buisson, but took the road to Ales, which lies a little lower down the stream.

While I was recrossing the hills the sun warmed the world again, and led back the trembling summer which had been scared by the early morning's frost. The half-benumbed butterflies opened and shut their wings many times upon the bramble leaves before they could bring themselves to believe that that pinch of winter was only a joke. It seemed a cruel jest while the bloom of honeysuckle was upon the hedges.



At Ales—a mere group of houses round a little old church with a broad squat tower—I lunched in a very wretched inn. If a pig had not been killed at an early hour that morning I should have been obliged to be satisfied with vegetable and egg diet; and the knowledge that the pig had met with such bad luck only a few hours before did not dispose me in favour of the various dishes prepared from the external and internal parts of him. The aubergiste was an old boatman of the Dordogne, who had steered many a cargo of wine floating with him down-stream in time of partial flood; but that was before the phylloxera had played havoc with the vines. Now he had to get along as well as he could by combining husbandry, pig-rearing, and innkeeping.

On reaching the river again, I perceived that the annual descent of the Auvergnats had commenced. All the people who live by the higher waters of the Dordogne, whether they belong to the Puy de Dme, the Cantal, or the Corrze, are called Auvergnats in Prigord, or, rather, such of them as come down the stream with their small barges laden with wood, when the autumnal rains have commenced, and there is sufficient water in the river for their purpose. Sometimes, in their anxiety to turn their wood into money, they start a little too early, and being misled by an increase of the current which is not maintained, they go aground after a few days' navigation. I have seen one of these boats stuck fast on a bank almost in mid-stream, with the rapids nearly breaking over it with a roar that could be heard a mile away. The wood is cut in the forests, which stretch almost without a break for many a league on both sides of the Upper Dordogne, and is seasoned, dressed, and shaped for barrel-making before it is put afloat. The boats, which are some thirty or forty feet long, are necessarily flat-bottomed, and are so roughly built that there are usually gaping spaces between the planks, which are caked with moss. They are good enough for the voyage, which is their first and last. The men return, but never the boats. These are sold as firewood at Libourne, when they have discharged their cargoes. Where the water is deep and comparatively quiet the speed is increased by rowing with very long oars; but where the current is strong the boat has only to be steered. This, however, is work that needs thorough knowledge of the river.

The autumn is a merry time for these Auvergnats. They look forward to it during the long months that they are working in the woods. The annual voyage to the Bordelais gives them an opportunity of again seeing the old friends whom they have been meeting for years at the waterside inns where they frequently put up at night, because the descent of the Dordogne in the dark is rather too exciting. They always say that they will start again in the morning at sunrise, but it often happens that the sun is very high indeed before they are afloat. After all, an Auvergnat is a man no less than another, and because he lives on next to nothing eleven months in the year is perhaps a reason why he should feel that he has earned the right to let his sentiments expand, and to light the lamp of conviviality in his breast during the remaining two or three weeks that he may be away from home.

There is this, however, to be said: whatever money he may possess, he trusts himself with very little when he goes off on his annual river-voyage, and when he has sold his wood he is anxious to get out of danger as quickly as possible.

I had to return some distance up-stream before I was able to cross to Limeuil. This is one of the most picturesque villages on the banks of the Dordogne. It is built on the side of an isolated rock, close to the point where the Vzre falls into the broader river. Before crossing the bridge I lingered awhile gazing at all those high-gabled roofs with red and lichen-stained tiles rising from the blue water towards the blue sky; vine trellises mingling their sunny green with the red of the roofs. Where no houses clung, the yellow rock was splashed with the now crimson sumach.

Then I climbed the long street over the rock and cobble stones between walls half green with pellitory, houses with high gables and rough wooden balconies where geraniums shone in the shadow, and from which the trailing plants hung low in that supreme luxuriance which is the beginning of their death. A few old women sat at their doors spinning, and geese, in small companies of three or four, waddled out of the way; but there was no sound of any kind—Limeuil was as silent as a cemetery. And yet there were cafs, which gave the place a false air of liveliness. Some tourists, attracted by the caverns in the valley of the Vzre, had possibly wandered as far as Limeuil; but where were the inhabitants now? Had there been an epidemic, and were the old women, whose heads were bent towards their knees while they clutched their distaffs, the few survivors?

Taking the road to Bugues, I passed a small church with an open belfry with a tiled roof supported by wooden pillars. It stood in a grove of tall cypresses and weeping willows, and the gravestones lay scattered round about. The waning sunshine seemed to fall more tenderly here than upon the open fields where the ruddy pumpkins flamed. It was nearly dark when I reached the little town of Bugues.



IN THE VALLEY OF THE VZRE.

The spring has come again, and I am now at Les Eyzies, in the valley of the Vzre: a paradise of exceptional richness to the scientific bone and flint grubber on account of the very marked predilection shown for it by the men of the Stone Age, polished and unpolished. It is about five in the morning, and the woods along the cliffs are just beginning to catch the pale fire of the rising sun. Just outside my open window are about twenty chickens in the charge of two mother hens, and as they have not been long awake, they do their utmost to make a noise in the world like other creatures that are empty. As soon as the neighbour's door is open they enter in a body, and march towards the kitchen. A female voice is heard to address something sharply to them in patois; there is a scuffle in the passage, and all the chickens scream together as they rush before the broom into the road. This is how the village day opens.

I am waiting for a man who has undertaken to show me some caverns in the neighbouring rocks. Meanwhile, another comes along, and makes mysterious signs to me from the road. He is barefoot and ragged, and does not look as if he had a taste for regular work, but rather as if he belonged to the somewhat numerous class who live by expedients, and have representatives in all ranks of society. He has a small sack in his hand, to which he points while he addresses me in patois. I tell him to come in. The sack contains crayfish, and now I know the reason of his mysterious air, for all fishing is prohibited at this time, and he is running the gauntlet of the garde-pche, who lives close by. The poor ragamuffin has been out all night, wading in the streams, and his wife, who looks, if possible, more eager and hungry than himself, is waiting near, keeping watch. He offers his crayfish for three sous the dozen, and I buy them of him without feeling that respect for the law and the spawning season which I know I ought to have. But I have suffered a good deal from bad example. There was a Procureur de la Rpublique not far from here the other day, and the first thing he asked for at the hotel was fish.

Presently the other man—the one I am waiting for—shows himself. He is a lean old soldier of the Empire, with a white moustache, kept short and stiff like a nailbrush. He is still active, and if he has any disease he is in happy ignorance of it; nevertheless, he confides to me that it is in the legs that he begins to feel his seventy-two years. His face has a very startling appearance. It is so scratched and torn that it makes me think of the man of the nursery-rhyme who jumped into the quickset-hedge; and, as it turns out, this one was just such another, only his movement was involuntary. He tells me how he came to be so disfigured. He was coming home with some cronies, at a late hour, from one of those Friendly Society meetings which in France, as in England, move the bottle as well as the soul, when, owing to an irregularity of the road, for which he was in no way to blame, he took an unintentional dive down a very steep bank, at the bottom of which was a dense forest of brambles. As he was quite unable to extricate himself, his companions, after a consultation, decided to haul him up by the legs; and it was to this manner of being rescued that he attributed most of the damage done to his ears.



We passed under the ruined castle of Les Eyzies, which was never very large, because the shelf of rock on which it was built would not have admitted of this; but when defended it must have been almost inaccessible. The ruin is very picturesque, with the overleaning rock above, and the clustered roofs below. The village is continued up the marshy valley of the Bene, which here joins that of the Vzre. In the face of the overleaning rocks are orifices that strike the attention at once by their shape, which distinguishes them from natural caverns. They have been all fashioned like common doors or windows on the rectangular principle, which proves that they are the artificial openings of human dwellings. The men who made their homes in the side of the precipice, and who cut the rock to suit their needs, must have let themselves down from the top by means of a rope. To what age these Troglodytes belonged nobody knows, but it is not doubted that they came after the flint-working savages, whose implements are found in the natural caverns and shelters near the ground.

We continued up the valley of the Bene. The banks under the rocks were starred with primroses, and from the rocks themselves there hung with cotoneaster the large and graceful white blossoms of that limestone-loving shrub, the amelanchier. In the centre of the valley stretched the marsh, flaming gold with flags and caltha, and dotted with white valerian. The green frogs leapt into the pools and runnels, burying themselves in the mud at the shock of a footstep; but the tadpoles sported recklessly in the sunny water, for as yet their legs as well as their troubles were to come. I confess that this long morass by the sparkling Bene, frequented by the heron, the snipe, the water-hen, and other creatures that seek the solitude, interested me more than the caverns which I had set out to see. I nevertheless followed the old man into them, and tried to admire all that he showed me; but there was not a stalactite six inches long the end of which had not been knocked off with a stick or stone. The anger that one feels at such mutilation of the water's beautiful work destroys the pleasure that one would otherwise derive from these caves in the limestone.

A visit, however, to the now celebrated cavern known as the Grotte de Miremont repaid me for the trouble of reaching it. It lies a few miles to the north of Les Eyzies, in the midst of very wild and barren country. From any one of the heights the landscape on every side is seen to be composed of hills covered with dark forest and separated by narrow valleys. Here and there the white rock stands out from the enveloping woods of oak, ilex, and chestnut, or the arid slope shows its waste of stones, whose nakedness the dry lavender vainly tries to cover with a light mantle of blue-gray tufts. It is these sterile places which yield the best truffles of Prigord. Sometimes trained dogs are used to hunt for the cryptogams, but, as in the Quercy, the pig is much more frequently employed for the purpose. A comical and ungainly-looking beast this often is: bony and haggard, with a long limp tail and exaggerated ears. A collar round the neck adds to its grotesqueness.

One has to climb or descend a steep wooded hill to reach the cavern, for the entrance is on the side of it. The mtayer acts as guide, and his services are indispensable, for there are few subterranean labyrinths so extensive and so puzzling as this.

Although the principal gallery is barely a mile in length, there are so many ramifications that one may walk for hours without making a complete exploration of the daedalian corridors, even with the help of the guide. With sufficient string to lay down and candles to light him, a stranger might enter these depths alone and come to no harm; but if he despised the string and trusted to his memory he would soon have reason to wish that he had remained on the surface of the earth, where, if he lost himself, there would be fellow-creatures to help him. Now with the sticky and tenacious clay trying to pull off his boots at every step, now walking like a monkey on hands and feet to keep his head from contact with the rock, he would grow weary after an hour or so, and begin to wish to go home, or, at any rate, to the hotel; but the more his desire to see daylight again took shape and clearness, the more bewildered he would become, and farther and farther he would probably wander from the small opening in the side of the hill. Thus he might at length hear the moan of water, and if it did not scare him, he would see by the glimmer of his solitary candle the gleam of a stream rushing madly along, then plunging deeper into the earth, to reappear nobody knows where. This cavern offers little of the beauty of stalactite and stalagmite; but the roof in many places has a very curious and fantastic appearance, derived from layers of flints embedded in the solid limestone, and exposed to view by the disintegration of the rock or the washing action of water. They can be best likened to the gnarled and brown roots of old trees, but they take all manner of fanciful forms.

The little house in which I am living stands almost on the spot where some particularly precious skeletons, attributed to prehistoric men and women, were dug up about twenty years ago, when the late Mr. Christy was here busily disturbing the soil that had been allowed to remain unmoved for ages. The overleaning rock, which is separated from my temporary home only by a few yards, probably afforded shelter to generations of those degraded human beings from whom the anthropologist who puts no bridle on his hobby-horse is pleased to claim descent. Near the base is one of those symmetrically scooped-out hollows which are such a striking peculiarity of the formation here, and which suggest to the irreverent that a cheese-taster of prehistoric dimensions must have been brought to bear upon the rocks when their consistency was about the same as that of fresh gruyre. According to one theory, they were washed out by the sea, that retired from the interior of Aquitaine long before the interesting savages who made arrow-heads and skin-scrapers out of flints, and needles out of bone, came to this valley and worked for M. Lartet and Mr. Christy. Others say that the sea had nothing to do with the fashioning of these hollows, but that they were made by the breaking and crumbling away of the more friable parts of the limestone under the action of air, frost, and water. While members of learned societies discuss such questions with upturned noses, a rock above them will sometimes be unable to keep its own countenance, but, simulating without flattery one of the human visages below, will wear an expression of humour fiendish enough to startle the least superstitious of men.

Upon the lower part of my rock is hanging the wild rose in flower, and above it is a patch of grass that is already brown, although we are in the first week of May; then upon a higher grass-grown steep is a solitary ilex, looking more worthy of a classic reputation than many others of its race. Its trunk appears to rise above the uppermost ridge of bare rock, and the outspread branches, with the sombre yet glittering foliage, are marked against the sky that is blue like the bluebell, as motionless as if they had been fixed there by heat, like a painted tree on porcelain.

On the other side of the house is a small balcony that looks upon the road, the peaceful valley, and the darkly-wooded cliffs just beyond the Vzre. During the brief twilight—the twilight of the South, that lays suddenly and almost without warning a rosy kiss upon the river and the reedy pool—I sometimes watch from the balcony the barefooted children of the neighbours playing upon the white road. Poor village children! As soon as a wanderer gets to know them, he leaves them never to see them again. Living in a great city is apt to dull the sensibility, and to close men up in themselves. In a village you become forcibly interested in surrounding humanity, and enter into the lives and feelings of others. A young woman died yesterday in child-birth, and was buried to-day. Everybody felt as if the awful shadow that descended upon the lonely house across the river had passed close to him and her, and left a chill in the heart. When the uncovered waggon bearing the deal coffin wrapped in a sheet, and having at the head an upright cross of flowers and leaves that shook and swayed with the jolting of this rustic hearse, moved towards the church, nearly the whole of the population followed. Only the day before another woman was carried along the same white road towards the little cemetery, but the coffin then was borne upon the shoulders of four persons of her own sex. Now and again fatigue brought the bearers to a standstill; then they would change shoulders by changing places. And the white coffin, moving up and down as a waif on the swell of the sea, passed on towards the glowing west, where presently the purple-tinted wings of evening covered it.

But the peasants are not sentimentalists—far from it. Always practical, they are very quick to perceive the futility of nursing grief, and especially the unreasonableness of wishing people back in the world who were no longer able to do their share of its work. A young man came into the village with a donkey and cart to fetch a coffin for his father who had just died.

'Ap! I dare say he was old,' was the reflection of our servant—a Quercynoise. If it had been the old father who had come to fetch a coffin for the young man, she would have found something more sympathetic to say than that.

Sometimes at sunset I climb the rugged hill behind the house. Then the stony soil no longer dazzles by its white glitter, but takes a soft tint of orange, or rose, or lilac, according to the stain of the sky, and there is no light in the rocky South that so tenderly touches the soul as this. Here the spurge drinks of the wine of heaven with golden lips wide open; but the hellebore, which has already lost all its vernal greenness, and is parched by the drought, ripens its drooping seeds sullenly on the shadowy side of the jutting crag, and seems to hate the sun. Higher and yet far below the plateau is a little field where the lately cut grass has been thrown into mounds. Here the light seems to gain a deeper feeling, and the small vineyard by the side holds it too. It is one of the very few old vineyards which, after being stricken nearly unto death by the phylloxera, have revived, and by some unknown virtue have recovered the sap and spirit of life. The ancient stocks gnarled and knotted, and as thick as a man's arm, together with the fresh green leaves and the hanging bunches of buds that promise wine, wear a colour that cannot be rightly named—a transparent, subtle, vaporous tint of golden pink or purple, which is the gift of this warm and wonderful light. A cricket that has climbed up one of the tender shoots strikes a low note, which is like the drowsy chirrup of a roosting bird. It is the first touch of a fiddler in the night's orchestra, and will soon be taken up by thousands of other crickets, bell-tinkling toads, croaking frogs in the valley, and the solitary owl that hoots from the hills. Below, how the river seems to sleep under the dusky wings of gathering dreams where the white bridge spans it! Beyond, where the blue-green sky is cut by a broken line of hill and tree, the rocks become animated in the clear-obscure, and the apparently dead matter, rousing from its apathy, takes awful forms and expressions of life.

My small boat had been lying on the Vzre several days doing nothing, when I decided upon a little water-faring up the stream. This canoe had been knocked together with a few deal boards. It had, as a matter of course, a flat bottom, for a boat with a keel would be quite unsuitable for travelling long distances on rivers where, if you cannot float in four inches of water, you must hold yourself in constant readiness to get out and drag or push your craft over the stones. This exercise is very amusing at the age of twenty, but the fun grows feeble as time goes on. My boat was not made to be rowed, but to be paddled, either with the short single-bladed paddle which is used by the fishermen of the Dordogne, and which they call a 'shovel,' or by the one that is dipped on both sides of the canoe alternately. There being rapids about every half-mile on the Vzre, and the current in places being very strong, I realized that no paddler would be able to get up the stream without help, and so I induced my landlord to accompany me and to bring a pole. He was a good-tempered man, somewhat adventurous, with plenty of information, and a full-flavoured local accent which often gave to what he said a point of humour that was not intended. The voyage, therefore, commenced under circumstances that promised nothing but pleasantness. It was a perfectly beautiful May afternoon, with a fresh north breeze blowing that tempered the ardour of the sun.

The water changed like the moods of a child who has only to choose the form and manner of his pleasure. Now it pictured in its large eye, whose depth seemed to meet eternity, the lights and forms and colours of the sky, the rocks, and the trees; now it leapt from the shaded quietude, and, splitting into two or more currents, separated by willowy islets or banks of pebbles, rushed with an eager and joyous cry a hundred yards or so; then it stopped to take breath, and moved dreamily on again. Where the water was shallow was many a broad patch of blooming ranunculus; so that it seemed as if the fairies had been holding a great battle of white flowers upon the river. We glided by the side of meadows where all the waving grass was full of sunshine. On the bank stood purple torches of dame's violet, and the dog-rose climbing upon the guelder rose was pictured with it in the water. On the opposite bank stood the great rocks which have caused this part of the river to be called the Gorge of Hell. Here human beings in perpetual terror of their own kind cut themselves holes in the face of the precipice, and lived where now the jackdaw, the hawk, the owl, and the bat are the only inhabitants. In the Middle Ages the English companies turned the side of the rock into a stronghold which was the terror of the surrounding district.

This fastness was called La Roque de Tayac, because the village of Tayac faces it on the other side of the river. Although only a few fragments of the masonry that was formerly attached to the rock remain, the chambers cut in the solid limestone are strange testimony of the habits and contrivances of England's lawless partisans in these remote valleys. The lower excavations evidently served for stables, as the mangers roughly cut in the rock testify. The horses or mules were led up and down a steep narrow ledge. A perpendicular boring, shaped like a well, connects the lowest chamber with those above, and there can be no doubt that the nethermost part served the purpose of a well or cistern. By means of a hanging rope a man could easily pull himself up to the higher stages and let himself down in the same manner. In the event of a surprise the rope would, of course, be pulled up. Woe to those who exposed their heads in this cylindrical passage to the stones which the defenders above had in readiness to hurl down! But the river flowing deeply at the base of the rock, no part of the fortress could have been easy of access. Such was the stronghold which obtained so evil a reputation throughout a wide district as an almost impregnable den of bandits and cut-throats.

We read that the English, who had fortified themselves at the Roque de Tayac, having ravaged the country of Sarlat in 1408, the men of Sarlat laid an ambush for them, and, taking them by surprise, cut them in pieces. But the next year, their numbers being again largely increased, they resumed their forays with the result that the Sarladais marched to the valley of the Vzre and regularly besieged the Roque de Tayac. The struggle was marked with great ferocity on both sides. The fortress was eventually captured, but the defenders sold their lives dearly, and many of the Sarladais, instead of returning to their homes, remained under the pavement of the church across the water.

Having passed the first rapids easily, we talked, and the conversation turned upon—cockchafers! My companion had been much impressed by the strange doings of a party of gipsy children whom he had lately passed on the highroad. One of them had climbed up a tree, the foliage of which had attracted a multitude of cockchafers, and he was shaking down the insects for the others to collect.

But it was not this that made the teller of the story stop and gaze with astonishment; it was the use to which the cockchafers were put. As they were picked up they were crammed into the children's mouths and devoured, legs, wings, and all. At first he thought the small gipsies were feasting on cherries. He declared that the sight disgusted him, and spoilt his appetite for the rest of the day. In this I thought his stomach somewhat inconsistent, for I knew of a little weakness that he had for raw snails, which, to my mind, are scarcely less revolting as food than live cockchafers. He would take advantage of a rainy day or a shower to catch his favourite prey upon his fruit-trees and cabbages. Having relieved them of their shells, and given them a rinse in some water, he would swallow them as people eat oysters. He had a firm belief in their invaluable medicinal action upon the throat and lungs. His brother, he said, would have died at twenty-three instead of at fifty-three had it not been for snails. He told me, too, of a man who, from bravado, tried to swallow in his presence, and at a single gulp, one of the big pale-shelled snails—known in Paris, where they are eaten, after being cooked with butter and garlic, as escargots de Bourgogne—but it stuck in his throat, and a catastrophe would have happened but for the sturdy blow which his companion gave him on the 'chine.' That a snail-eater should criticise gipsies for eating cockchafers shows what creatures of prejudice we all are.

After passing the Nine Brothers—a name given to nine rocks of rounded outline standing by the water like towers of a fortress built by demi-gods—we had our worst fight with the rapids, and were nearly beaten. It was the last push of the pole from the man behind me, when he had no more breath in his body, that saved us from being whirled round and carried back. Before one gets used to it, the sensation of struggling up a river where it descends a rocky channel at a rather steep gradient is a little bewildering. The flash of the water dazzles, and its rapid movement makes one giddy. There is no excitement, however, so exhilarating as that which comes of a hard battle with one of the forces of nature, especially when nature does not get the best of it. This tug-of-war over, we were going along smoothly upon rather deep water, when I heard a splash behind me, and on looking round saw my companion in a position that did not afford him much opportunity for gesticulation. He was up to his middle in the water, but hitched on to the side of the boat with his heels and hands. He had given a vigorous push with his pole upon a stone that rolled, and he rolled too. Now, the boat being very light and narrow, an effort on his part to return to his former position would have filled it with water; so he remained still while I, bringing my weight to bear on the other side, managed to haul him up by the arms. After this experience, he was restless and apparently uncomfortable, and we had not gone much farther before he expressed a wish to land on the edge of a field. Here he took off the garments which he now felt were superfluous, vigorously wrung the water out of them, and spread them in the sun to dry. I left him there fighting with the flies, whose curiosity and enterprise were naturally excited by such rare good luck, and went to dream awhile in the shadow of the rock, on the very edge of which are the ramparts of the ruined castle of La Madeleine. This is the most picturesque bit of the valley of the Vzre; but to feel all the romance of it, and all the poetry of a perfect union of rocks and ruin, trees and water, one must glide upon the river, that here is deep and calm, and is full of that mystery of infinitely-intermingled shadow and reflection which is the hope and the despair of the landscape-painter. Now, in this month of May, the shrubs that clung to the furrowed face of the white rock were freshly green, and the low plaint of the nightingale, and the jocund cry of the more distant cuckoo, broke the sameness of the great chorus of grasshoppers in the sunny meadows.

When I returned to my companion, I found that he was clothed again, but not in a contented frame of mind. He accompanied me as far as Tursac, and then started off home on foot. He had had enough of the river. There was still sufficient daylight for me to continue the voyage to Le Moustier, but, apart from the fact that I could not get up the rapids alone, I was quite willing to pass the night at Tursac.

Having chained the boat to a willow, I walked through the meadows towards a group of houses, in the midst of which stood a church, easily distinguished by its walls and tower. When I had arranged matters for the night, I passed through the doorway of this little church, under whose vault the same human story that begins with the christening, receives a new impetus from marriage, and is brought to an end by the funeral, had been repeated by so many sons after their fathers. The air was heavy with the fragrance of roses from the Lady Chapel, where a little lamp gleamed on the ground beside the altar. As the sun went down, the roses and leaves began to brighten with the shine of the lamp, like a garden corner in the early moonlight.

At the inn I met one of those commercial travellers who work about in the rural districts of France, driving from village to village with their samples, fiercely competing for the favours of the rustic shopkeeper, doing their utmost to get before one another, and be the first bee that sucks the flower, taking advantage of one another's errors and accidents, but always good friends and excellent table companions when they meet. I learnt that my new acquaintance was 'in the drapery.' We were comparing notes of our experience in the rough country of the Corrze, when he, as he rolled up another cigarette, said:

'I had learnt to put up with a good deal in the Corrze, but one day I had a surprise which was too much for me. I had dined at one of those auberges that you have been speaking of, and then asked for some coffee. It was an old man who made it, and he strained it through—guess what he strained it through!'

I guessed it was something not very appropriate, but was too discreet to give it a name.

'Eh bien! It was the heel of an old woollen stocking!'

'And did you drink the coffee?'

'No. I said that I had changed my mind.'

We did not take any coffee that evening. We had something less likely to set the fancy exploring the secrets of the kitchen, where, through the open doorway, we could see our old peasant hostess seated on her little bench in the ingle and nodding her head over the dying embers of her hearth. Her husband was induced by the traveller to bring up from the cherished corner of his cellar a bottle of the old wine of Tursac, made from the patriarchal vines before the pestilential insect drew the life out of them. The hillsides above the Vzre are growing green again with vineyards, and again the juice of the grape is beginning to flow abundantly; but years must pass before it will be worthy of being put into the same cellar with the few bottles of the old wine which have been treasured up here and there by the grower, but which he thinks it a sacrilege to drink on occasions less solemn than marriages or christenings in the family.

'You can often coax the old wine from them,' said my knowing companion, 'if you go the right way to work.'

'And what is the secret?'

'Flattery: there is nothing like it. Flatter the peasant and you will be almost sure to move him. Say, 'Ah, what a time that was when you had the old wine in your cellars!' He will say, 'Nest-ce pas, monsieur?' and brighten up at the thought of it. Then you will continue: 'Yes, indeed, that was a wine worth drinking. There was nothing like it to be found within fifty kilomtres. What a bouquet! What a fine got du terroir!' He will not be able to bear much more of this if he has any of the wine. Unless you are pretty sure that he has some, it is not worth while talking about it. Expect him to disappear, and to come back presently with a dirty-looking bottle, which he will handle as tenderly as if it were a new baby.'

Those whose travelling in France is carried out according to the directions given in guide-books—the writers of which nurse the reader's respectability with the fondest care—will of course conclude that the best hotels in the wine districts are those in which the best wine of the country is to be had. This is an error. The wine in the larger hotels is almost invariably the 'wine of commerce'; that is to say, a mixture of different sorts more or less 'doctored' with sulphate of lime, to overcome a natural aversion to travelling. The hotel-keeper, in order to keep on good terms with the representatives of the wine-merchants—all mixers—who stop at his house, distributes his custom among them. Those who set value on a pure vin du pays with a specific flavour belonging to the soil, should look for it in the little out-of-the-way auberge lying amongst the vineyards. There it is probable that some of the old stock is still left, and if the vigneron-innkeeper says it is the old wine, the traveller may confidently believe him. I have never known in such cases any attempt at deception.

The next morning I reached Le Moustier. Here the valley is broad, but the rocks, which are like the footstools of the hills, shut in the landscape all around. These naked perpendicular masses of limestone, yellow like ochre or as white as chalk, and reflecting the brilliance of the sun, must have afforded shelter to quite a dense population in the days when man made his weapons and implements from flints, and is supposed to have lived contemporaneously with the reindeer. Notwithstanding all the digging and searching that has gone on of late years on this spot, the soil in the neighbourhood of the once inhabited caverns and shelters is still full of the traces of prehistoric man.

Shortly before my coming, a savant—everybody is called a savant here who goes about with his nose towards the ground—gave a man two francs to be allowed to dig for a few hours in a corner of his garden. The man was willing enough to have his ground cleared of stones on these terms. The savant therefore went to work, and when he left in the evening he took with him half a sackful of flints and bones.

In a side valley close to Le Moustier is a line of high vertical or overleaning rocks. A ledge accessible from the ground runs along the face, and nearly in the centre, and at the back of it, are numerous hollows in the calcareous stone, some natural, others partly scooped out with the aid of metal implements, whose marks can still be seen. Each of these shelters was inhabited. Holes and recesses have been cut in the walls to serve for various domestic purposes, and on the ground are traces of fireplaces, reservoirs for water, etc. The original inhabitants of these hollows may have been savages no more advanced in the arts than those who worked flints, but it is certain that the latest occupiers were much more civilized. Rows of holes roughly cut in the limestone show where the ends of beams once rested, and the use of these timbers was evidently to support a roof that covered much of the ledge. It is quite certain that people lived here in the Middle Ages, and they might do so now but for the difficulty of bringing up water. The security which the position afforded could hardly have been lost sight of in the days when the inhabitants of Guyenne were in constant dread of being attacked. One must therefore be guarded against wild talk about prehistoric man in connection with these rock dwellings, which in many cases were used as fortresses during the three hundred years' struggle between the English and French in Aquitaine.

My waterfaring back to Les Eyzies was far easier than the voyage up-stream. Nevertheless, there was some excitement in it, for when the rapids were reached, the current snatched the boat, as it were, from me, but carried me with it, by little reefs each marked out as an islet as white as snow, by the floating flowers of the water ranunculus; but when its strength failed, it left me to drift where, in the dark shadow of rock and tree, the water rested from its race. Presently the rapids were seen again dancing in the sun, and the boat, gliding on to just where the smooth surface curved and the current took its leap without a ripple, darted forward like a startled water-bird. Once a back current whirled my fragile boat completely round. Then I remembered the good advice of the friendly Otter at Beynac with reference to going down these streams, where the water has to be watched with some attention if one does not wish to get capsized: 'Tenez-vous toujours dans le plus fort du courant.'

Again in calm water, I recognised, beyond the still grass and the scattered flame of the poppies, the high walls of the fortress-like church of Tayac, with the light of the sinking sun upon them. Then a little lower down at the ford, which was my stopping-place, a pair of bullocks were crossing the river with a waggon-load of hay; so that the picturesque, the idyllic, and the sentiment of peace were all blended so perfectly as to make me feel that the pen was powerless, and that the painter's brush alone could save the scene from passing away for ever.

Tayac and Les Eyzies form one very straggling commune, and the church where the slain men of Sarlat lie serves for the entire population. This edifice of the eleventh and twelfth centuries deserves a brief description. There is much grandeur in its vast, deeply-recessed Romanesque portal, with marble columns in the jambs and numerous archivolts. Then its high, narrow windows, and the low, square towers, pierced with loopholes, give to it that air of the fortress which immediately impresses the beholder. Without doubt it was built like so many other churches of the same stormy and uncertain period, to be used as a place of refuge in case of danger. The entrance to the principal tower is artfully concealed at the back of a chapel at the east end, and can only be reached with a ladder. The very narrow passage makes two or more right angles before it leads to the foot of the spiral staircase—a disposition of great value in defence.

Having heard of a cavern in the garden of the presbytery which, in the memory of living people, was the refuge of a murderer whom the gendarmes were afraid to follow underground, because it was believed that he would knock them on the head one after the other while they were wriggling through the passage, and then quietly walk out by a back way unknown to anyone but himself, I felt a strong desire to explore this cave of evil repute. The idea was all the more enticing because I was assured that nobody had entered it but the murderer. I called upon the cur, and asked him how he felt at the prospect of a little trip underground in his own garden. He did not seem to feel very eager for the adventure; but when I proposed to go alone, he was too polite to let me depart with his best wishes. He decided to accompany me. When he had put on his oldest soutane, we started with a packet of candles and a ball of string.

Priests' gardens are often very interesting, and the one through which we now passed pleased me greatly. It was a long strip, in two or three terraces, upon the rocky hillside. Many fruit-trees, but chiefly almond, cherry, and peach, were scattered over it. There was also a straggling vine-trellis, from which there now spread in the June air that sweet fragrance of the freshly-opened flower-buds of which the poet-king Solomon sung. In the highest part was the cavern. We had to crawl in upon our hands and knees, and in some places to lie out almost flat. As my friend the cur insisted upon going first, I could not help thinking that the back view of him, as he wormed his way along the low gallery, was not exactly sacerdotal. Sometimes we passed over smooth sand—evidently left by a stream that once issued here; at other times over small stones, which were bad for the knees. We kept a keen look-out for the remains of prehistoric men and beasts, but only found the shells of eggs which a fox had probably stolen from the cur's fowl-house. There were also rabbits' bones, whose presence there was to be explained in the same way. My companion, however, having once entered his cave, was resolved upon returning another day and digging conscientiously in the sand, which appeared to be very deep in places. He may since have unearthed some pre-historic treasures there. The cavern was interesting as showing the honeycombing effects of water on limestone rock, but it did not lead very far into the hill. The belief that the murderer escaped by another opening than the one by which he entered was founded on fiction.

After the cave exploration, the cur was so good as to accompany me to a mysterious ruin in the neighbourhood, which he believed to be of English origin, because it was always spoken of by the people of the locality as William's Chapel. The English pronunciation of the name William had been preserved in the patois. After this, I did not doubt that his supposition was correct. Some Englishman was connected with the history of the building; but was it really a chapel? The hill that we had to climb to it was very high, and, although covered with herbage, almost precipitous. The building was not on the summit, but on a ledge of rock some distance down the cliff. The ruin consisted of only a few fragments of wall, built very strongly of well-shaped stones laid together without mortar. Holes cut in the rock showed where the ends of beams had rested. The position was rather one for a fortress than for a chapel; but no doubt Englishmen of an eccentrically religious turn appeared as early as the thirteenth or fourteenth century, if not earlier. If the people of the valley climbed up to William's Chapel to say their prayers, they must have been very pious indeed.

The strength of the current in the Vzre had turned me from my first plan, which was to ascend the river as far as Montignac, and take the road thence to Hautefort, the birthplace of Bertrand de Born, who was put into hell by Dante for having encouraged Henry Plantagenet's sons to rebel against their father. The sombre Florentine treated the troubadour baron with excessive harshness, for it is recorded of Bertrand that his repentance for the sins of his restless and agitated life was so sincere that he ended his days as a monk in the monastery of Cteaux. [Footnote: 'Mobile, agit, comme son aventureuse existence qui commenca au donjon d'Hautefort et s'teint dans le silence du cloitre de Cteaux.—'Discours sur les clbrits du Prigord,' par L. Sauveroche.]

Bertrand de Born was an evil counsellor to Henry Court-Mantel, but a singularly attractive figure of the twelfth century was this troubadour noble, whose life in the world was divided between the soothing charm of the 'gai savoir' and the excitement of war, and who was equally at his ease whether he was holding the lance or the pen. He had the tenderest friendship for the young Prince, and mourned his death in the best elegy that appeared at the dawn of modern literature.



Of the ancient fortress of Bertrand de Born, Viscount of Hautefort, a few vestiges are left, which may be easily distinguished from the later masonry of the castle with which they are combined.



IN THE VALLEY OF THE ISLE.

It was in the full flame of noon on a hot June day that we arrived at the headquarters which I had chosen for my second summer in Prigord. It was a little chteau, of which I was to occupy a small wing, and also a low building that was quite detached—all very plain and rustic, as, indeed, most of the really old chteaux that are still inhabited are. At this burning hour the place seemed as quiet as the ideal retreat of a literary hermit could be. In the large old-fashioned garden, where magnolias and firs mingled with all kinds of fruit-trees, and lettuce-beds were fringed with balsams, golden apricots hung upon the branches that were breaking with their weight, and seemed to say: 'There is nobody here to eat us. We are quite tired of waiting to be gathered.'

Suddenly there was a great noise of barking, and three or four dogs that had smelt or heard strangers rushed through the archway that led to the court, which was so much like a farm-yard that no one would know the difference from the description.

'Mees! Mees! Black! Black!' cried a voice from within.

There was nothing in the sound of these words to cause astonishment, for most French dogs that move in good society have English names. If you were to call out at any respectable gathering of these animals, whether in the North or the South, 'Fox,' 'Stop,' 'Black,' 'Mees' (not Miss), the chances are that they would all try to reply at once.

After the dogs came bare-footed domestics of both sexes, who stared at us wonderingly, while saluting politely, and evidently not wishing to show their curiosity. Then, when we entered the court, we were met by a great many fowls, ducks, and turkeys of various ages. Not a few had apparently just jumped out of their shells. Lastly came the master and mistress of the house, advancing in the slow and stately style of the times when the drawbridge would have had to be lowered, but moving in the midst of the poultry. They were gracious and hospitable, and very soon we settled down, altogether well pleased with our new quarters.

Here we were surrounded by trees just as Robinson Crusoe was by his grove when it had grown tall and thick. Now, the traveller in Southern France who lingers as I am wont to linger in my wanderings, will probably have cause to pine, as I have pined, for trees about his house to shelter him from the fury of the summer sun. There are few houses that are not hovels or ruins to be found, except where the land is fertile, and wherever it repays labour the owner loathes a tree that produces nothing but its wood. Thus we get those wide, burning plains, where so few trees are to be seen save poplars along the watercourses and walnuts bordering the roads. Even these become rare, as in journeying farther south the last low buttresses of the rocky highlands are left behind.

Here, close to this retreat that I had chosen on the banks of the Isle, some twenty miles below Prigueux, rose, on the opposite side of the river, high cliffs of white limestone with wooded brows. The chteau was on a small island formed by a curve of the river under the cliffs, and a short canal drawn across the loop to facilitate the navigation of the Isle.

A very lazy kind of navigation it was. Two or three barges would pass in a day on their way to Prigueux or Bordeaux. They were of considerable size, and were capable of some sea-faring, but their masts were now laid flat, and they were towed along at the rate of two or three yards a minute by a lean and melancholy horse that had ceased to care for cursing, and was almost indifferent to beating. As the navigation had been nearly killed by the railway, the canal was allowed to fill itself with water-plants, which were interesting to me, but exceedingly hurtful to the temper of the bargees. They vented their fury upon the engineer, who was absent, and the horse that was present—unfortunately for the poor brute, for somehow he seemed to be looked upon as a representative of the negligent functionary.

'You appear to be having a bad time,' said I one day to a great dark bargee who was streaming from every pore, as much from bad temper as from the exertion of cracking his whip, and whose haggard horse looked as if he would soon break off in the middle from the strain of trying to move the barge, which was stuck in the weeds.

'A bad time of it! I believe you. Sacr-r-r-re! If I could only send that pig of an engineer to Nouma I should be a happy man!'

If wishes could have wafted him, he would have gone farther than New Caledonia long before.

One day, far on in the summer, this engineer actually appeared upon the canal in his steam yacht, and there was great excitement in the country. The peasants left their work in the fields and ran to the banks to gaze at him. He did not go very far before he got stuck in the weeds himself. Then he reversed his engine, made back as fast as he could, and was seen no more.

But I am going on too fast. I have not yet described the chteau. The picture of it is clearly engraved upon the memory, and a very pretty picture I still think it; more so now, perhaps, than when the reality was before me, for such is the way of the mind. I can see the extinguisher roofs of the small towers through openings in the foliage rising from a sunny space enclosed by trees. I can see the garden, with its old dove-cot like a low round tower, its scattered aviaries, its rambling vines that climb the laden fruit-trees, its firs, magnolias, great laurels, its glowing tomatoes and melons, its lettuces and capsicums and scattered flowers, all mingled with that carelessness which is art unconscious of its own grace; its daedalian paths, its statues so quaintly placed in unsuspected corners, its—well, the picture is finished, for now begins the effort to recall its details. The eye's memory is a judicious painter that never overcrowds the canvas. I can see on that side of the building, which looks upon a much wilder garden, where peach and plum trees stride over grassy ground adjoining the filbert-grove that dwindles away into the wooded warren, a broad line of tall nettles in the shade against the wall. Hard by, on the line—so it was said—of the filled-up moat, is a row of ancient quinces, with long crooked arms, green, gray, or black with moss and lichen, stretching down to the tall grass, where in the dewy hours of early darkness the glow-worms gleam.

This little chteau was never a stronghold to inspire an enemy with much respect; it was rather a castellated manor-house, dating from the times when even the residences of the small nobility were fortified. Marred as it had been by alterations made in the present century without any respect for the past, it was still very interesting. In one of the towers, said to be of the fourteenth, and certainly not later than the fifteenth, century, was a chapel on the ground-floor with Gothic vaulting, and which still served its original purpose. A contemporaneous tower flanking the entrance contained the old spiral staircase leading to the upper rooms. I often lingered upon it in astonishment at the mathematical science shown in its design, and the mechanical perfection of its workmanship. What seemed to be a slender column round which the spiral vaulting turned was not really one, for each of the stone steps was so cut as to include a section of the column as a part of its own block. The contrivances by which this staircase en colimaon was made to hold together, and to hold so well as to have lasted several hundred years, with a promise to continue in the same way another century or two, were deftly hidden from the eye of those unversed in such technicalities. In the hollow at the foot of the stairs was what I took to be a very old and rough christening font, such as I had seen in village churches. But it was not that; it was called a pierre l'huile. Its purpose a long time ago was to receive the oil taken from the first pressing of walnuts after the annual gathering. Then the priests came and fetched what they wanted of it to serve for the rites of the Church during the year.

All this summer we lived out of doors, except at night. Even Rosalie, our servant, did most of her cooking in the open air with the aid of a portable charcoal stove, which she placed in the shade of some noble plane-trees that were planted by accident on the day of Prince Louis Napolon's coup d'tat. They were already tall and strong when his Will-o'-the-wisp, which he had mistaken for a star, sank in the bloody swamp of Sedan. When the rising wind announced a storm, the swaying branches shed their dry bark, which was piled upon the hearth indoors, where a cheerful blaze shot up if by chance the rain fell and the air grew chilly. But very seldom did even a shower come to moisten the parched land and cool the heated air. Thus the plane-trees came to look upon the stove beneath them as a fixture.

These open-air kitchens are by no means uncommon in Southern France during the hot months. I have a pleasant recollection of dining one scented evening in May with my friend the Otter at Beynac in his garden terraced upon rocks above the Dordogne. The table was under a spreading chestnut-tree in full bloom. Not many yards away the swarthy Clodine had her kitchen beneath an acacia. Strange as it may seem, the hissing of her frying-pan as she dropped into it the shining fish did not mingle unpoetically with the murmur of lagging bees overhead and the soothing plaint of the river running over its shallows below. Nor, when the purple flush faded on the water's face, and little points of fire began to show between branches laden with the snow of flowers, did the fragrant steam that arose from Clodine's coffee-pot make a bad marriage with the amorous breath of all the seen and unseen blossoms. What is there better in life than hours such as those?

But now I am by the Isle. The plane-trees are on the edge of a little dell, in the centre of which is a smooth space encircled by many trees, forming a dense grove. A rough table has been set up here with the aid of planks and tressels. It is our dining-table, and the centre of the grove is our salle manger. Wrens and blackcaps hop about the branches of the filbert-bushes, and when the mtayer's lean cat comes sneaking along, followed by a hungry kitten that is only too willing to take lessons in craft and slaughter, the little birds follow them about from branch to branch, scolding the marauders at a safe distance, and giving the alarm to all the other feathered people in the grove. Here the nightingales warble day and night until they get their young, when, finding that hunting for worms and grubs to put into other beaks than their own is very prosaic business, they only sing when they have time to fly to some topmost twig and forget that they are married.

When the sun is near setting, a sound very different from the warble of a bird is heard close by. It is some leader of a frog orchestra in the sedges of the canal giving the first note. It is like a quirk of gluttony just rousing from the torpor of satisfaction. The note is almost immediately taken up by other frogs, and the croaking travels along the canal-banks as fire would if there were a gale to help it. But the music only lasts a few minutes, for the hour is yet too early for the great performance. The frogs are only beginning to feel a little lively. It is when the sun has gone quite down, and the stars begin to twinkle upon the water, that the ball really opens. Then the gay tumult seems to extinguish every other sound, and to fill the firmament. Oh! they must have a high time of it, these little green-backed frogs that make so much noise throughout the warm nights of June. Sometimes I creep into my canoe and paddle by the light of moon or stars as noiselessly as I can along the fringe of sedges and flags and bullrushes, hoping to watch them at their gambols. But the frog is a very sly reptile, and you must stay up very late indeed in order to be a match for him in craft, unless you dazzle his eyes with the light of a torch or lantern. Then he is a fool in the presence of that which is out of the order of his surroundings, and his amazement or curiosity paralyzes his muscles. It is in this way that those who want the jolly frog just to eat his hind-legs la poulette or otherwise catch him with the hand, unless they have the patience and the cruelty to fish for him with a hook baited with a bit of red flannel.

Now I will speak of my own hermitage, my ideal nook for writing, reading, and doing nothing, which, after much wandering and vain searching, I found at length here. Yes, I found it at last; and I much fear that I shall never find another like it. It lay at the back of the chteau, beyond the shaded nettles and the ancient quinces. My ordinary way to it was through a piece of waste, which, with unintentional sarcasm, was called the 'Little Park.' It was overgrown by burdocks, to which it had been abandoned for years—who could tell how many?—and was rambled over by turkeys, guinea-hens, and other poultry. Then I passed through a little gate, crossed another bit of waste that was neither lawn nor field, skirted a patch of buckwheat, and entered a small wood or shrubbery, where plum and filbert trees grew with oaks and beeches, until I came to water. This was the vivier of the chteau—fishpond, long drawn out like a canal, and fed by a spring, but which had been left to itself until it was nearly shaded over by alders and other trees. At the end farthest from all habitations was a little structure built of stones, open on one side, and with small orifices in the three remaining walls. These could be closed, and yet they were not windows. Their purpose was much more like that of loopholes in a mediaeval barbican. They were to enable the man inside to watch the movements of migratory birds, and to send his shot into the thick of them when, unsuspecting danger, they chanced to come within range. The little building was an afft. Near to it was a sort of fixed cage, intended for decoy birds, but it had long been without tenants when I took possession of this refuge from all the human noises of the world. The other sounds did not worry me, although they often drew me from my work. The splash of a fish would take me to the water's edge, where I would watch the small pikes lying like straight roots that jut from the banks under water. The cooing of the little brown turtles in the trees overhead, the movements of a pair of kingfishers that would often settle close by upon an old stump, the magpies and jays, and especially the oriels, would make my thoughts wander amongst the leaves while the ink was drying in the pen. The oriels tantalized me, because I could always hear them in the crests of the trees, until, about the middle of August, they went away on their long journey to the South, but could very rarely catch sight of their gold and black plumage. Although they will draw near to gardens to steal fruit when they have eaten the wild cherries, they are among the most suspicious and wary of birds.

The oriel is a strange singer. It generally begins by screeching harshly; then follow three or four flute-like notes, which seem to indicate that the bird could be a musician if it would only persevere. But it will not take the trouble. It goes on repeating its 'Lor-e-oh!' just as its tree-top companions, the cicadas, keep up their monotonous creaking.

From my cabin I could see all the lights, colours, and shadows of the day change and pass, but the sweetest music of the summer hours was heard when the soft sunshine of evening fell in patches on the darkening water, and on the green grass on each side of the brown path strewn with last year's trodden leaves.

Sometimes a hedgehog would creep across the narrow path, shaded with nut-bushes, oaks, and alders towards the water, and at night—I was often there at night—the glow-worms gleamed all about upon the ground, and there were mysterious whisperings whose cause I could not trace. Yes, it was an ideal literary hermitage, but as perfection is not to be found anywhere on land or water, even this spot had its drawback. There were too many mosquitoes. My friend the owner of the chteau often said to me, 'La moustigue de l'Isle n'est pas mchante;' but on this point I could not agree with him. I bore upon me visible signs of its wickedness; but in course of time I and the 'mostique de I'Isle' lived quite harmoniously together in the little shanty under the trees.

Where the weedy and shady avenue leading to the chteau made an angle with the highroad, there was often a caravan or tilt-cart stationed for days together. Sometimes it was the travelling house of a tinker and his family; in which case the man was generally to be seen working outside upon his pots and pans in the shade of a tree. Sometimes it belonged to a party of basket and rustic-chair makers, who gathered the reeds and hazel-sticks that they needed as they passed through the country. Some were gipsies, and some were not; but all were baked by the sun almost to the colour of Moors. Having a taste for nomadic life myself, I used to stay and talk to these people from time to time; but none of them interested me so much as the wandering cobbler and his dog, whose acquaintance I had made higher up the country amongst the rocks.

I can still see them both in the shade of the old gateway; the man seated in the entrance of the little tower, where, at the top of the spiral staircase, is the village prison; the dog lying with his nose upon his paws just within the line drawn by the gateway's shadow across the dazzling road. They both came one evening and took up their position here with as much assurance as if it had been theirs by right of inheritance. They soon set to work, the man mending boots and shoes, and the dog making himself disagreeable to all the male members of the canine population for a couple of miles or so around. Until the cobbler's companion settled down comfortably, he had several exhilarating fights with local dogs that looked upon him as an intruder and an impostor. He really was both. He had no great courage, but he had grown impudent and daring from the day that he had first worn a collar armed with spikes. When his enemies had taken a few bites at this, they came to the conclusion that there was something very wrong in his anatomy. After the first encounter they were not only willing to leave him alone, but were exceedingly anxious to 'cut' him when they met him unexpectedly. They approached the gateway as little as possible; but when they were obliged to pass it, they drew their tails under them, showed the whites of their eyes, and having crept very stealthily to within ten yards or so of the archway where the interloper appeared to be dozing, they made a valiant rush towards the opening. Notwithstanding these precautions, the cobbler's dog, which had been watching them all the while out of the corner of one eye, was often too quick for them.

Man and dog were ludicrously alike both in appearance and character. The beast was one of the ugliest of mongrels, and the man might well have been the final expression of the admixture of all races, whose types had been taken by destiny from the lowest grades of society. They were both grizzly, thick-set, and surly. They both seemed to have reached the decline of life with the same unconquerable loathing of water, except as a means of quenching thirst. The dog, although some remote bull-dog ancestor had bequeathed him short hair, had bristles all over his face just like his master. They were a couple of cynics, but they believed in one another, and loved one another with an affection that was quite edifying. The dog wished for nothing better than to lie hour after hour near his master, hoping always, however, for an occasional fight to keep him in health and spirits. The cobbler did nothing to make himself liked by the inhabitants, but he could afford to work more cheaply than others who were 'established,' and who had a wife and children to keep; consequently the pile of old boots and shoes that looked quite unmendable rose in front of him, and for three or four weeks he remained in the same place stitching and tapping. Having locked up his things at night in the tower—he had obtained permission to make this use of it—he disappeared with his dog, and what became of them until next day was a mystery.

I admired the blunt independence and practical philosophy of this homeless man. Although he was disagreeable to others, he was on good terms with himself, and seemed quite satisfied with his lot. If, when he had named his price for mending a pair of shoes, anybody tried to beat him down, he would say, 'Take them and mend them yourself!' His incivility obtained for him a reputation for honesty, and his prices were soon accepted without a murmur. He talked to nobody unless he was obliged to do so, and by his moroseness he came to be respected. I managed to draw him into conversation once by feigning to be much impressed by the comeliness and amiable nature of his dog, and he then told me that he had been wandering ever since he was a boy in Languedoc and Guyenne, stopping in a village as long as there was work to do and then moving on to another. Wherever people wore boots or shoes—if it were only on Sundays—there was always something to be done by working cheaply.

The silent cobbler might have kept his open-air shop longer than he did in the shadow of the mediaeval gateway, if his dog had not quarrelled with the sole representative of police authority for having put on his gala uniform, which included a cocked-hat and a sword. For this want of respect the animal was imprisoned in the room of the tower, to the great joy of all the other dogs, but to the intense grief of his master, who found it impossible to turn a deaf ear to the plaintive moans that reached him from above. And thus it came to pass that they went away together rather suddenly in search of a gateway somewhere else, the dog earnestly praying, after his fashion, that it might not be one with a tower.

One June morning, soon after sunrise, twenty-seven mowers came to the chteau to cut the grass in the great meadow lying between the river under the cliffs and my moat—I called it mine because it was almost made over to me for the time being, together with the bit of wood and the cabin. Each mower brought with him his scythe, an implement of husbandry which in France is in no danger of being classed with agricultural curiosities of the past. Here the reaping and the mowing machine make very little progress in the competition between manual and mechanical labour. In the southern provinces, few owners of the soil have ever seen such contrivances. People who cling to the poetic associations of the scythe and the sickle—and who does not that has been awakened by their music in his childhood?—must not cry out against the laws which have caused the land of France to be divided up into such a multitude of small properties, for it is just this that preserves the old simplicity of agriculture as effectually as if some idyllic poet with a fierce hatred of all machines were the autocratic ruler of the country. Whether the nation gains or loses by such a state of things is a question for political economists to wrangle over; but that the artist, the seeker of the picturesque, the romantic roamer, and the sentimental lover of old custom gain by it can hardly be denied.

Some of the mowers were men of sixty, others were youths of seventeen or eighteen: all were contented at the prospect of earning nothing, but of being treated with high good cheer. Now, victuals and drink are a great deal in this life, but not everything, and these men would not have come on such terms had they not been moved by a neighbourly spirit. They were themselves all landowners, or sons of landowners. Had wages been given, two francs for the day would have been considered high pay, and the food would have been very rough. No turkeys would have had their throats cut; no coffee and rum would have been served round. In short, this haymaking day was treated as an annual festival.

A goodly sight was the long line of mowers as their scythes swept round and the flowery swathes fell on the broad mead in the tender sunshine, while the edges of the belt of trees were still softened by the morning mist. After the mowers, all the workers employed on the home-farm, men, women, and boys, entered the field to turn the swathes, which in a few hours were dried by the burning sun. On the morrow a couple of oxen drew a creaking waggon into the field, and when the angelus sounded from the church-tower in the evening the haymaking was over. But I have not yet described the mowers' feast.

At about ten o'clock the big bell that hangs outside the chteau is rung, and the mowers, dropping their scythes, leave the field and troop into the great kitchen, which has changed so little for centuries. The pots and pans hanging against the walls, and the pieces of bacon from the beams, have been renewed, but not much else. There is the same floor paved with stones, now much cracked and worn into hollows, the same hearth and broad chimney with hanging chain; and the long table and benches stretching from end to end, although their age is uncertain, were certainly fashioned upon the exact model of others that preceded them. Richard Coeur-de-Lion, when campaigning in Guyenne, may have sat down many a time to such a table as this, and to just such a meal as the one that is about to be served to the mowers, with the exception of the coffee and rum.

Let us take a look into the great caldrons, which appear to have come out of Gargantua's kitchen. One contains two full-sized turkeys and several fowls, another a leg of pork, and a third a considerable portion of a calf. Then there is a caldron of soup, made very 'thick and slab.' Home-baked loaves, round like trenchers, and weighing 10lb. each, are on the side table, together with an immense bowl of salad and a regiment of bottles filled with wine newly drawn from the cask.

In the evening, when all the grass has been cut, there is another and a greater feast. The work being done, the men linger long at the table. Then all the household is assembled in the great kitchen, including the chtelain and chtelaine, and the young men who are known to have voices are called upon to sing. They do not need much pressing, for what with the heat of the sun during the day, then the wine, the coffee and rum, their blood is rushing rather hotly through the veins. One after another they stand up on the benches and give out their voices from their sturdy chests, which are burnt to the colour of terra-cotta. They make so much noise that the old warming-pan trembles against the wall. Although they all speak patois among themselves, they are reluctant to sing the songs of Prigord in the presence of strangers. The young men are proud of their French, bad as it is, and a song in the caf-concert style of music and poetry fires their ambition to excel on a festive occasion like this, whilst their patois ditties seem then only fit to be sung at home or in the fields. At length, however, they allow themselves to be persuaded, and they sing in chorus a 'Reapers' Song,' composed long ago by some unknown Prigourdin poet, who was perhaps a jongleur or a troubadour. The notes are so arranged as to imitate the rhythmic movements of the reaper: first the drawing back of the right arm, then the stroke of the sickle, and lastly, the laying down of the cut corn. There is something of sadness as well as of joy in the repeated cadences of the simple song, and it moves the heart, for now the old men join in, and the sound gathers such strength that the little martins under the eaves must be pressing troubled breasts against their young.

This chteau had remained in the same family for centuries, and the actual owner, although by no means indifferent to the noble exploits of his ancestors, had long ago settled down to the life of an agricultural gentleman, and devoted what energy may have come down to him from the Crusaders to the cultivation of tobacco, the improvement of stock, the rearing of pigeons and poultry, the planting of trees, and a great deal more belonging to the same order of interest. He was a strongly marked type of the gentilhomme campagnard, in whom blue blood combines perfectly with rustic tastes and simplicity of manners. Like most men who live greatly to themselves, he had his hobbies, and they were all of a very respectable kind. One was to surround himself with trees; another was to have all kinds of captive birds about him. I was never able to know exactly how many aviaries he possessed, for I was always finding a fresh one curiously hidden in some neglected corner. He liked to mix up all sorts of birds together, such as pigeons, doves—tame and wild—blackbirds, linnets, canaries, chaffinches, sparrows, tomtits—no, the tomtits had been turned out. I asked why.

'Because,' said M. de V., 'there is no bird so wicked for its size as the titmouse. It pecks other birds with which it is shut up so often in the same part of the head that at length it makes a hole and picks out the brains.'

He used to catch his birds by means of a long net, and his favourite place for spreading it was along the side of the patch of buckwheat which was sown to feed the captives. He was a true lover of birds, and by observing them had stored up in his mind a fund of curious knowledge respecting their characters and habits. He only worked a portion of his land with the aid of the servants of the chteau; the rest was farmed on the system of mtayage, for which he had a very strong liking. He said it was far preferable from the landlord's point of view to leasing, because the owner of the soil remained absolute master of his property. He could take care that nothing was done which did not please him, for the mtayer or colon was on no firmer footing than that of an upper servant. If the landlord was not satisfied with the manner in which his land was treated, or if he suspected his mtayer of trying to take an unfair advantage of him in the division of proceeds, all he had to do was to change him for another. But it was the interest of both to work well together, and it was the duty of the landlord to assist the mtayer as much as possible, especially when times were hard.

On this estate the colons were housed free, but they paid one-third of the taxes. At the time of sowing, the seed was found by the landlord, but the colon returned half of the amount when the crop was gathered.

Mtayage, or the system of sharing results between the landowner and the labouring peasant, still flourishes in France, notwithstanding the severe denunciations passed upon it by various writers. If it were a very bad system, it would have fallen into disuse long before now, for although the French have a tendency to keep their wheels in old ruts, they are as keen as any other people in protecting their own interests. It is a system that would soon become impossible without trustfulness and honesty. On both sides there must be fair dealing. The colon must feel that the landlord will help him in time of trial and need, and the landlord must feel that the colon is not trying to cheat him. In the great majority of cases, the man who does the ploughing, the sowing and the harvesting quite realizes that honesty with him is the best policy, and the owner of the soil knows that it is to his interest to support his mtayer, and encourage him with judicious aid when the times are bad. The mtayer, who has hope of making a little money over and above what is barely sufficient to support himself and his family, and knows that results will depend largely upon his own sagacity and industry, works with a steady zeal that it would be unreasonable to expect of the hired labourer, who, having his measured wage always in his mind's eye, has no incentive to do more than what is rigorously expected of him.