up the ideas that are
aroused by the sight of industrious poverty; while the thought of ease,
secured after long years of toil, is suggested by some larger houses
farther on, with their red roofs of flat round tiles, shaped like the
scales of a fish. There is no door, moreover, that does not duly exhibit
a basket in which the cheeses are hung up to dry. Every roadside and
every croft is adorned with vines; which here, as in Italy, they train
to grow about dwarf elm trees, whose leaves are stripped off to feed the
cattle.

Nature, in her caprice, has brought the sloping hills on either side
so near together in some places, that there is no room for fields, or
buildings, or peasants' huts. Nothing lies between them but the torrent,
roaring over its waterfalls between two lofty walls of granite that rise
above it, their sides covered with the leafage of tall beeches and
dark fir trees to the height of a hundred feet. The trees, with their
different kinds of foliage, rise up straight and tall, fantastically
colored by patches of lichen, forming magnificent colonnades, with a
line of straggling hedgerow of guelder rose, briar rose, box and arbutus
above and below the roadway at their feet. The subtle perfume of this
undergrowth was mingled just then with scents from the wild mountain
region and with the aromatic fragrance of young larch shoots, budding
poplars, and resinous pines.

Here and there a wreath of mist about the heights sometimes hid and
sometimes gave glimpses of the gray crags, that seemed as dim and vague
as the soft flecks of cloud dispersed among them. The whole face of the
country changed every moment with the changing light in the sky; the
hues of the mountains, the soft shades of their lower slopes, the very
shape of the valleys seemed to vary continually. A ray of sunlight
through the tree-stems, a clear space made by nature in the woods, or a
landslip here and there, coming as a surprise to make a contrast in the
foreground, made up an endless series of pictures delightful to see amid
the silence, at the time of year when all things grow young, and when
the sun fills a cloudless heaven with a blaze of light. In short, it was
a fair land--it was the land of France!

The traveler was a tall man, dressed from head to foot in a suit of blue
cloth, which must have been brushed just as carefully every morning
as the glossy coat of his horse. He held himself firm and erect in the
saddle like an old cavalry