d without fear, and in Bielsa, as in Venasque and Torla,
the little place has but one. At Bielsa, it is near the bridge and
is kept by Pedro Pertos: I have not slept in it, but I believe it
to be clean and good. El Plan has a Posada called the Posada of the
Sun (del Sol), but it is not praised; nay, it is detested by those
who speak from experience. The inn that stands or stood at the
lower part of the Val d'Arazas is said to be good; that at Torla is
not so much an inn as an old chief's house or manor called that of
"Viu," for that is the name of the family that owns it. They treat
travellers very well.

This is all that I know of the inns of the Pyrenees.

That is practical writing, admirably done, and, as we should judge,
without having tested it, no less likely to be useful to the traveller
because it is a prose of literary flavour. On the other hand, the
personal avowal in the last sentence gives confidence.

We must continue to look at Mr. Belloc's travels from what we loosely
call the practical point of view, and we arrive now at those books in
which travel is the means to the pursuit of a certain sort of study.
That is the study of history and, in particular, of military events,
which can properly be carried out only on the ground where these took
place.

We have said that his travel is the material out of which his history is
made, and that, though a wide generalization, is to a great extent
strictly accurate. His notion of the Western race and its solidarity
derives its force not only from a careful and vigorous interpretation of
written records, but also from observation of that race to-day. You may
see in _Esto Perpetua_ how he verified and amplified his theory very
practically by a journey through Northern Africa.

It is true also that his gifts of clear-headedness and lucidity which
make valuable his interpretations of written records make it easy for
him to read country, to grasp its present possibilities and the effects
which it must have had in the past. This steady gift of shrewd and apt
vision of the things which really are makes him a useful monitor in a
time when men usually deal in gratuitously spun theories.

His eye for country is a symbol, as well as an example, of his best
talents. To him, it seems, a piece of ground, an English county, say, is
an orderly shape, not the jumble of ups and downs, fields, roads and
woods which appears to most