he had a right to learn something in return, and administered
various questions respecting customs which he believed to prevail in
England. He evidently did not credit the denial of the truth of what he
had heard, nor yet the assertion, in answer to another question, that
English hothouse grapes are three or four times as large as the ordinary
grapes of France, and well-flavoured in at least a like proportion. The
roadside was planted with apple-trees, and these were overgrown with
mistletoe; so, by way of correcting his idea that the English are a sad
and gloomy people, I informed him of the use made of this parasite by
young people in the country at Christmas-time. Instead, however, of
being thereby impressed with our national liveliness, he looked with a
sort of supercilious contempt upon a people who could require the
intervention or sanction of anything external in such a matter, and
turned the conversation to some more worthy subject.

At length we passed into a pleasant valley, with thrushes singing, and
much chirping of those smaller birds, in the murder of which, sitting,
consists _le sport_ in the eyes of many gentlemen of France. Up to this
point, nothing could have been more unlike the scenery which I had so
far found to be associated with glacieres; but now the country became
slightly more Jurane, and limestone precipices on a small scale rose up
on either hand, decked with the corbel towers which result from the
weathering of the rock. It was the Jura in softer as well as smaller
type, for all the desolate wildness which characterises the more rocky
part of that range was gone, and there were no signs of the grand
pine-scenery, or needle-foliage, as the Germans call it; the trees were
all oak and ash and beech, and the rocks were much more neat and
orderly, and of course less grand, than their contorted kindred farther
south. The valley speedily became very narrow, and a final bend brought
us face-to-face with the buildings of the Abbaye de Grace-Dieu, striking
from their position--filling, as they do, the breadth of the
valley,--but in no way remarkable architecturally. The journey had been
so long that it was now ten o'clock; and as we were due in Besancon at
five in the evening, we put the horse up as quickly as possible, in a
shed provided by the Brothers, and set off on foot for the glaciere,
half an hour distant. About a mile and a half from the convent, the
valley comes to an end, the rocks on the o