we liked, or rather just where Carroll had liked; and Carroll had had the
_De Bello Gallico_ in his pocket, and had had a notion, I fancy, of
taking in the whole ground of the Roman conquest--I remember he lugged me
off to some place or other, Pourrieres I believe its name was, because--I
forget how many thousands--were killed in a river-bed there, and they
stove in the water-casks so that if the men wanted water they'd have to
go forward and fight for it. And then we'd gone on to Arles, where
Carroll had fallen in love with everything that had a bow of black
velvet in her hair, and after that Tarascon, Nimes, and so on, the usual
round--I won't bother you with that. In a word, we'd had two months of
it, eating almonds and apricots from the trees, watching the women at the
communal washing-fountains under the dark plane-trees, singing _Magali_
and the _Que Cantes_, and Carroll yarning away all the time about Caesar
and Vercingetorix and Dante, and trying to learn Provencal so that he
could read the stuff in the _Journal des Felibriges_ that he'd never have
looked at if it had been in English....

"Well, we got to Darbisson. We'd run across some young chap or
other--Rangon his name was--who was a vine-planter in those parts, and
Rangon had asked us to spend a couple of days with him, with him and his
mother, if we happened to be in the neighbourhood. So as we might as
well happen to be there as anywhere else, we sent him a postcard and
went. This would be in June or early in July. All day we walked across
a plain of vines, past hurdles of wattled _cannes_ and great wind-screens
of velvety cypresses, sixty feet high, all white with dust on the north
side of 'em, for the mistral was having its three-days' revel, and it
whistled and roared through the _cannes_ till scores of yards of 'em
at a time were bowed nearly to the earth. A roaring day it was, I
remember.... But the wind fell a little late in the afternoon, and we
were poring over what it had left of our Ordnance Survey--like fools,
we'd got the unmounted paper maps instead of the linen ones--when Rangon
himself found us, coming out to meet us in a very badly turned-out trap.
He drove us back himself, through Darbisson, to the house, a mile and a
half beyond it, where he lived with his mother.

"He spoke no English, Rangon didn't, though, of course, both French and
Provencal; and as he drove us, there was Carroll, using him as a
Franco-Provencal dictionary, peppering