rmenting vats. Our author saw the vats in the Chateau Margaux
cellars the day after they had been filled, and heard, deep down,
'perhaps eight feet down in the juice, a seething, gushing sound, as
if currents and eddies were beginning to flow, in obedience to the
influence of the working spirit; and now and then a hiss and a low
bubbling throb, as though of a pot about to boil.' In a little while,
it would have been impossible to breathe an atmosphere thus saturated
with carbonic acid gas; and the superintendents can only watch the
process of nature by listening outside the door to 'the inarticulate
accents and indistinct rumblings' which proclaim a great
metempsychosis. 'Is there not something fanciful and poetic in the
notion of this change taking place mysteriously in the darkness, when
all the doors are locked and barred--for the atmosphere about the vats
is death--as if nature would suffer no idle prying into her mystic
operations, and as if the grand transmutation and projection from
juice to wine had in it something of a secret and solemn and awful
nature--fenced round, as it were, and protected from vulgar curiosity
by the invisible halo of stifling gas?'

The vintagers naturally claim our attention next. A portion of them
are, of course, the peasantry of the village and neighbourhood; but a
country like France, swarming with poor who are not mendicants, has of
course a floating population, that surges almost instinctively upon
every spot where there is pleasant work to do. The vintage not merely
affords this work, but being attended with all sorts of jollity, the
crowds it collects have a peculiarly vagabond character. You see at a
glance that they are there upon a spree, and submit to the labour, not
as anything they like, or are accustomed to, but as a mere passport to
the fun. They are in France what the Irish harvesters and the Kent
hop-pickers are in England, although always preserving the
peculiarities, that distinguish the former country, giving even her
vagabondage a melodramatic look, just as if they were 'made up' for
the occasion. 'The gendarmerie,' says our author, 'have a busy time of
it when these gentry are collected in numbers in the district. Poultry
disappear with the most miraculous promptitude; small linen articles
hung out to dry have no more chance than if Falstaff's regiment were
marching by; and garden fruit and vegetables, of course, share the
results produced by a rigid application of