The girls and women are particularly well favoured, dark, as becomes their Southern origin, well featured, favouring the Grecian rather than the Roman type. They have less of the imperious self-conscious dignity of their sisters in Spain and other Latin countries, and seem frank and more human and in touch with the life around them. The Church finds in them its chief adherents, faithful still in a country where once everybody believed and few inquired, and now, where few believe and all ask questions. New vistas of thought were opened up in Provence during the Revolution epoch, and ever since the view has widened. In the churches nearly all the little brass plates on the prie-dieu chairs have the prefix Mme. or Mlle. engraved upon them. One seldom comes across Monsieur. In summer, when the heat of the brilliant day gives place to the lovely glow of the Provençal evening, all Avignon sits outside around the tables that trespass in careless fashion upon the pavements. The gossip of the day goes round amidst unrestrained laughter and merriment. The café on the pavement is as truly a Gallic institution as the “Bullring” is Spanish. Spain carried her “institution” to her remotest colonies, and France has done the same with the café. The scene on a summer evening in the Place de l’Hôtel de Ville in Avignon is but a repetition on a smaller scale of what may be seen on any evening from one year’s end to the other in the Cannebière at Marseilles, or farther distant still, across the Mediterranean in the Place du Gouvernement in the French city of Algiers. [Illustration: BOATS ON THE RHONE.] The Romans introduced their great national institutions for amusement, the amphitheatre and the circus, into nearly all their colonies, no matter how distant, and the modern Gaul has emulated the older and far greater coloniser in this respect. Even on the borders of the Great Desert the outside café is firmly planted amongst a people who boast a longer civilisation than their conquerors--a feat which the Romans found impossible, for the amphitheatre of Rome made no headway amongst the conquered Greeks. [Illustration: AVIGNON] But the Place, with all its gay life upon a summer evening, is not a lasting memory of Avignon. The picture that remains upon the mind is the view from the suspension bridge, just where it reaches the isle of Barthelasse. From this point of vantage Avignon, bathed in the evening glow, assumes a thoroughly mediæval aspect. The dark masses of the Rocks of the Dom, the Cathedral, the Papal Palace, the church spires and belfries are all softened and mellowed in the mystic light of the afterglow in the west, until fancy suggests that the intervening years have, in some subtle way, been bridged over, and the beholder is back in those days when the proud prelates ruled like kings, nay despots, in this fortress town beside the Rhone. VILLENEUVE II VILLENEUVE