able to poor folk as though a desert lay between them, with
no means of reaching a market for their products (if they produced
anything), close to an unexplored forest which supplied them with wood
and the uncertain livelihood of poaching, the inhabitants often suffered
from hunger during the winters. The soil not being suitable for wheat,
and the unfortunate peasantry having neither cattle of any kind nor
farming implements, they lived for the most part on chestnuts.

Any one who has studied zoological productions in a museum, or become
personally aware of the indescribable depression caused by the brown
tones of all European products, will understand how the constant sight
of these gray, arid plains must have affected the moral nature of the
inhabitants, through the desolate sense of utter barrenness which they
present to the eye. There, in those dismal regions, is neither coolness
nor brightness, nor shade nor contrast,--none of all those ideas and
spectacles of Nature which awaken and rejoice the heart; even a stunted
apple-tree would be hailed as a friend.

A country road, recently made, runs through the centre of this great
plain, and meets the high-road. Upon it, at a distance of some fifteen
miles from the high-road, stands Montegnac, at the foot of a hill,
as its name designates, the chief town of a canton or district in
the Haute-Vienne. The hill is part of Montegnac, which thus unites
a mountainous scenery with that of the plains. This district is a
miniature Scotland, with its lowlands and highlands. Behind the hill, at
the foot of which lies the village, rises, at a distance of about three
miles, the first peak of the Correze mountains. The space between
is covered by the great forest of Montegnac, which clothes the hill,
extends over the valley, and along the slopes of the mountain (though
these are bare in some places), continuing as far as the highway to
Aubusson, where it diminishes to a point near a steep embankment on
that road. This embankment commands a ravine through which the post-road
between Bordeaux and Lyon passes. Travellers, either afoot or in
carriages, were often stopped in the depths of this dangerous gorge
by highwaymen, whose deeds of violence went unpunished, for the site
favored them; they could instantly disappear, by ways known to them
alone, into the inaccessible parts of the forest.

Such a region was naturally out of reach of law. No one now travelled
through it. Without circul