The whole of Nature's paint-box seemed flung into one passionate last declaration of colour on the canvas of the dying year. Flaming red, soft carmine, deepening into vermilion; rich orange fading to darker crimson; soft lilac changing swiftly to purple. The whole atmosphere, as far as the eye could reach, seemed flaming, shimmering with a glow as of a gorgeous sunset; red seemed literally painted deep into the air; it seemed pulsing with flame colour. High on the banks were piled the ferns in huge masses of crimson and rich chocolate brown; here and there turning to brick red the dying fronds carpeting thickly the ground all around and beneath the trees. Now and again, coming as almost a relief from the very excess of vivid colour, would show up the welcome contrast given by a stretch of cold lilac slate, and in the middle distance a line of the faintest rose pink, delicate in tone, and indefinite as to outline. Beyond that, the pale blue of the distant pines, far up the rising ground upon the horizon. The stems of the pines are a rich, red brown, flaked in places, and covered, some of them, with various coloured lichens and fungi. These trees are, most of them, seamed and scarred with one slash down the middle for the resin. At a few inches from the ground is fastened a little cup, into which the resin flows, and at certain times men go round to collect the cupfuls. Each _résinier_ has, in order to earn his livelihood, to notch three hundred pines each day; this is done with a sort of hatchet. The little cups were an invention of a Frenchman named Hughes, in 1844, but were never used until some time after his death; so he personally reaped no benefit from the invention. After the oil is collected, it is subjected to many distillations, some of which, as it is well known, are used medically. Here and there in the woods are stacked, in the shape of a hut, sloped and sloping, little bundles of faggots. Under the trees, white against the sombre shade of the pines, gleam the sandy paths which traverse the wide heathy plains which, alternately with the forests, make up the landscape of this part of the Landes. These are varied, now and again, by roads the colour of rich iron ore. The fences here are all made of the thinnest lath striplings and seem put up more as suggestions than to compel!