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mere bars of iron hanging to a ring; but others are much more
artistic, showing heads coifed in the style of the fifteenth and
sixteenth centuries, serpents biting their own tails, and all manner
of fanciful ideas wrought into iron. In wandering about the dim old
streets, paved with cobble stones, architectural details of singular
interest strike one at every turn. Now it is the encorbelment of a
turret at the angle of a fifteenth or sixteenth century mansion that
has lost all its importance; now a dark archway with fantastic heads
grimacing from the wall; now an arcade of Gothic windows, with
graceful columns and delicate carvings--a beautiful fragment in the
midst of ruin.

What helps much to render these dingy streets, passages, and courts of
Figeac so delightfully picturesque is the vegetation which, growing
with southern luxuriance in places seemingly least favourable to it,
clings to the ancient masonry, or brightens it by the strong contrast
of its immediate neighbourhood in some little garden or balustraded
terrace. Wherever there are a few feet of ground some rough poles
support a luxuriant vine-trellis, and grapes ripen where one might
suppose scarcely a gleam of sunshine could fall. The vine clambers
over everything, and sometimes reaches to the top of a house two
stories high. The old walls of Figeac are likewise tapestried with
pellitory and ivy-linaria, with here and there a fern pushing its
deep-green frond farther into the shadow, or an orpine sedum lifting
its head of purple flowers into the sunshine that changes it to a
flame.

There is much in the life of this place that matches perfectly with
the surroundings. Enter by a Gothic doorway, and you will come upon a
nail-maker's forge, and see a dog turning the wheel that keeps the
bellows continually blowing. The wheel is about a foot broad, and
stands some three feet high. The dog jumps into it at a sign from his
master, and as the wheel turns the sparks from the forge fall about
the animal in showers. Each dog is expected to work five or six hours;
then, when his task is done, he is allowed to amuse himself as he
pleases, while a comrade takes his turn at the wheel. The nail-makers
discovered long ago that dog labour was cheaper than boy labour, and
not so troublesome. Nevertheless, these wheels belong to an order of
things that has nearly passed away.

The crier or _tambourineur_, as he is generally called, because he
carries a drum, which he b