owed here led down into
the rich valley of Creysse, blessed with abundance of fruit. Here I
found the nightingales and the spring flowers that avoid the
wind-blown hills. Patches of wayside took a yellow tinge from the
cross-wort galium; others, conquered by ground-ivy or veronica, were
purple or blue. Presently the tiled roofs of the village of Creysse
were seen through the poplars and walnuts. A delightful spot for a
poetical angler is this, for the Dordogne runs close by in the shadow
of prodigious rocks and overhanging trees. What a noble and stately
river I thought it, as the old ferryman, with white cotton nightcap on
his head, punted me across! I took the greater pleasure in its breadth
and grandeur here because I had seen it an infant river in the
Auvergne mountains, and had watched its growth as it rushed between
walls of rock and forest towards the plains.

What witchery of romance and spell-bound fancy is in the song of the
Dordogne as it breaks over its shallows under high rocky cliffs and
ruined castles! Everything that can charm the poet and the artist is
here. The grandeur of rugged nature combines with the most enticing
beauty of water and meadow, and the voices of the past echo with a
sweet sadness from cliff to cliff. It is said that several of these
castles were built to prevent the English from coming up the river,
but this may be treated as one of the many fanciful legends respecting
the British period which are repeated throughout Aquitaine.

By cutting off a curve of the Dordogne I soon came to the river-side
village of Meyronne, and here I stopped for a meal at a very pleasant
little inn, where to my surprise I found that I had been preceded a
few days before by another Englishman, who, accompanied by a
Frenchman, had come up from Bordeaux in a boat. They must have found
it very hard work rowing against the rapids. The hostess here was
evidently a woman who treasured her household gods, but who liked also
to show them. She gave me my coffee in a china cup that looked as if
it had belonged to her great-grandmother; and in the bright little
room where she served my lunch was a large walnut buffet elaborately
and admirably carved, bearing the date 1676.

After Meyronne my road ran for a few miles beside the broad and
curving river. The forms of the great cliffs on each side were ever
changing. Over a sky intensely blue sailed the fleecy April clouds
before the soft west wind, and whenever the sun