water. One initial
difficulty in the way of getting along in the Landes is the sheer
impossibility of walking. When the early settler left his hut to pay
a morning call or walk about his daily duties, he sank ankle deep in
sand.

But the human mind invariably rises superior to difficulties of this
character.

What the "backstay" is to the inhabitant of the district around Lydd,
the stilts are to the lonely dwellers in the Landes. The peasants of
the department are not exactly born on stilts, but a child learns to
walk on them about the age that his British brother is beginning to
toddle on foot.

Stilts have the elementary recommendation of overcoming the difficulty
of moving about in the Landes. In addition, they raise a man to a
commanding altitude, and enable him to go about his daily business at
a pace forbidden to ordinary pedestrians. The stilts are, in truth,
a modern realisation of the gift of the seven-league boots. They are
so much a part of the daily life of the people that, except when he
stoops his head to enter his hut, the peasant of the Landes would as
soon think of taking off his legs by way of resting himself as of
removing his stilts. The shepherds, out all day tending their sheep,
might, if they pleased, stretch themselves at full length on the grey
sand, making a pillow of the low bushes. But they prefer to stand;
and you may see them, reclining against a third pole stuck in the
ground at the rear, contentedly knitting stockings, keeping the while
one eye upon the flock of sheep anxiously nibbling at the meagre grass.

Next to the shepherds, the most remarkable live stock in the Landes
are the sheep. Such a melancholy careworn flock! poor relations of
the plump Southdown that grazes on fat Sussex wolds. Long-legged,
scraggy-necked, anxious-eyed, the sheep of the Landes bear eloquent
testimony to the penury of the place and the difficulty of making both
ends meet--which in their case implies the burrowing of the nose in
tufts of sand-girt grass. To abide among such sheep through the long
day should be enough to make any man melancholy. But the peasant of
the Landes, who is used to his stilts, also grows accustomed to his
sheep, and they all live together more or less happily ever afterwards.

The Landes is quite a prosperous province to-day compared with what it
was in the time of Louis XVI. During the First Empire there was what
we would call a Minister of Woods and Forests named Bremontier.