an amount of luggage for a journey after all so
short! There were no individual objects; there was nothing but dozens
and hundreds, all machine-made and expressionless, in spite of the
repeated grimace, the conscious smartness, of "the last new thing," that
was stamped on all of them. The fatal facility of the French _article_
becomes at last as irritating as the refrain of a popular song. The poor
"Indiens Galibis" struck me as really more interesting--a group of
stunted savages who formed one of the attractions of the place and were
confined in a pen in the open air, with a rabble of people pushing and
squeezing, hanging over the barrier, to look at them. They had no
grimace, no pretension to be new, no desire to catch your eye. They
looked at their visitors no more than they looked at each other, and
seemed ancient, indifferent, terribly bored.

[Illustration]

Chapter xix

[Toulouse]

There is much entertainment in the journey through the wide, smiling
garden of Gascony; I speak of it as I took it in going from Bordeaux to
Toulouse. It is the south, quite the south, and had for the present
narrator its full measure of the charm he is always determined to find
in countries that may even by courtesy be said to appertain to the sun.
It was, moreover, the happy and genial view of these mild latitudes,
which, goodness knows, often have a dreariness of their own; a land
teeming with corn and wine and speaking everywhere (that is everywhere
the phylloxera had not laid it waste) of wealth and plenty. The road
runs constantly near the Garonne, touching now and then its slow, brown,
rather sullen stream, a sullenness that encloses great dangers and
disasters. The traces of the horrible floods of 1875 have disappeared,
and the land smiles placidly enough while it waits for another
immersion. Toulouse, at the period I speak of, was up to its middle (and
in places above it) in water, and looks still as if it had been
thoroughly soaked--as if it had faded and shrivelled with a long
steeping. The fields and copses, of course, are more forgiving. The
railway line follows as well the charming Canal du Midi, which is as
pretty as a river, barring the straightness, and here and there occupies
the foreground, beneath a screen of dense, tall trees, while the Garonne
takes a larger and more irregular course a little way beyond it. People
who are fond of canals--and, speaking from the pictorial standpoint, I
hold the taste to