cial temper. But I am
afraid he was superstitious. When he was nine years old, he had seen one
night a company of _bourgeois et dames qui faisaient la manege avec des
chaises_, and concluded that he was in the presence of a witches'
Sabbath. I suppose, but venture with timidity on the suggestion, that
this may have been a romantic and nocturnal picnic party. Again, coming
from Pradelles with his brother, they saw a great empty cart drawn by
six enormous horses before them on the road. The driver cried aloud and
filled the mountains with the cracking of his whip. He never seemed to
go faster than a walk, yet it was impossible to overtake him; and at
length, at the corner of a hill, the whole equipage disappeared bodily
into the night. At the time, people said it was the devil _qui s'amusait
a faire ca_.

I suggested there was nothing more likely, as he must have some
amusement.

The foreman said it was odd, but there was less of that sort of thing
than formerly. "_C'est difficile_," he added, "_a expliquer_."

When we were well up on the moors and the _Conductor_ was trying some
road-metal with the gauge--

"Hark!" said the foreman, "do you hear nothing?"

We listened, and the wind, which was blowing chilly out of the east,
brought a faint, tangled jangling to our ears.

"It is the flocks of Vivarais," said he.

For every summer, the flocks out of all Ardeche are brought up to
pasture on these grassy plateaux.

Here and there a little private flock was being tended by a girl, one
spinning with a distaff, another seated on a wall and intently making
lace. This last, when we addressed her, leaped up in a panic and put out
her arms, like a person swimming, to keep us at a distance, and it was
some seconds before we could persuade her of the honesty of our
intentions.

The _Conductor_ told me of another herdswoman from whom he had once
asked his road while he was yet new to the country, and who fled from
him, driving her beasts before her, until he had given up the
information in despair. A tale of old lawlessness may yet be read in
these uncouth timidities.

The winter in these uplands is a dangerous and melancholy time. Houses
are snowed up, and wayfarers lost in a flurry within hail of their own
fireside. No man ventures abroad without meat and a bottle of wine,
which he replenishes at every wine-shop; and even thus equipped he takes
the road with terror. All day the family sits about the fire in a foul
and