r ricks
and the nature of their implements, but French in the aspect of their
fields. One might also discuss--it would be most profitable of
all--where they are Spanish and where they are French in their
observance of religion.

This freak which the frontier plays in cutting so united a countryside
into two by an imaginary line is further emphasised by an island of
Spanish territory which has been left stranded, as it were, in the midst
of the valley. It is called Llivia, and is about as large as a large
English country parish, with a small country town in the middle.

One comes across the fields from villages where the signs and villagers
and the very look of the surface of the road are French; one suddenly
notices Spanish soldiers, Spanish signs, and Spanish prices in the
streets of the little place; one leaves it, and in five minutes one is
in France again. It is connected with its own country by a neutral road,
but it is an island of territory all the same, and the reason that it
was so left isolated is very typical of the old regime, with its solemn
legal pedantry, which we in England alone preserve in all Western
Europe. For the treaty which marked the limits here ceded to the French
"the valley and all its villages." The Spaniards pleaded that Llivia was
not a village but a town, and their plea was admitted.

I began by saying that this wide basin of land, with its strong people
and its isolated traditions, though it was so little known to-day, would
soon be too well known. So it will be, and the reason is this, that the
very low pass at one end of it will soon be crossed by a railway. It is
the only low pass in the Pyrenees, and it is so gradual and even (upon
the Spanish side) that the railway will everywhere be above ground.
Within perhaps five years it will be for the Pyrenees what the Brenner
is for the Alps, and when that is done any one who has read this may go
and see for himself whether it is not true that from that plain at
evening the frontier ridge of Andorra seems to be the highest thing in
the world.

CARCASSONNE

Carcassonne differs from other monumental towns in this: that it
preserves exactly the aspect of many centuries up to a certain moment,
and from that moment has "set," and has suffered no further change. You
see and touch, as you walk along its ramparts, all the generations from
that crisis in the fifth century when the public power was finally
despaired of--and after which e