e stranger who had in the morning visited the
Allees de Meillan had been seen in the evening walking in the little
village of the Catalans, and afterwards observed to enter a poor
fisherman's hut, and to pass more than an hour in inquiring after
persons who had either been dead or gone away for more than fifteen or
sixteen years. But on the following day the family from whom all these
particulars had been asked received a handsome present, consisting of an
entirely new fishing-boat, with two seines and a tender. The delighted
recipients of these munificent gifts would gladly have poured out
their thanks to their generous benefactor, but they had seen him,
upon quitting the hut, merely give some orders to a sailor, and then
springing lightly on horseback, leave Marseilles by the Porte d'Aix.

Chapter 26. The Pont du Gard Inn.

Such of my readers as have made a pedestrian excursion to the south
of France may perchance have noticed, about midway between the town of
Beaucaire and the village of Bellegarde,--a little nearer to the former
than to the latter,--a small roadside inn, from the front of which
hung, creaking and flapping in the wind, a sheet of tin covered with
a grotesque representation of the Pont du Gard. This modern place of
entertainment stood on the left-hand side of the post road, and backed
upon the Rhone. It also boasted of what in Languedoc is styled a garden,
consisting of a small plot of ground, on the side opposite to the main
entrance reserved for the reception of guests. A few dingy olives and
stunted fig-trees struggled hard for existence, but their withered dusty
foliage abundantly proved how unequal was the conflict. Between these
sickly shrubs grew a scanty supply of garlic, tomatoes, and eschalots;
while, lone and solitary, like a forgotten sentinel, a tall pine raised
its melancholy head in one of the corners of this unattractive spot, and
displayed its flexible stem and fan-shaped summit dried and cracked by
the fierce heat of the sub-tropical sun.

In the surrounding plain, which more resembled a dusty lake than solid
ground, were scattered a few miserable stalks of wheat, the effect,
no doubt, of a curious desire on the part of the agriculturists of the
country to see whether such a thing as the raising of grain in those
parched regions was practicable. Each stalk served as a perch for a
grasshopper, which regaled the passers by through this Egyptian scene
with its strident, monotonous