In the village street the inevitable little stream, which is encouraged in most French towns, runs beside the roadside, and is fed by all the pailfuls of dirty water that are flung from time to time into its midst. The _plage_ at Arcachon is not attractive in autumn, and it is difficult to understand how it can be a magnet at a warmer time of the year to the hundreds that frequent it. An arm of land stretches all round the little inland pool--for it is not much more than a pool--in which in summer time the bathers disport themselves. In November, of course, it requires an enormous effort of imagination to picture it full of sailing ships and pleasure boats. Murray mentions a particular kind of boat, long, pointed, narrow and shallow, which was much to the fore in 1867, and which he imagined to be indigenous to the soil, so to speak. But, apparently, they have changed all that. I only saw one that was built as he describes, and this was green and black in colour. He also mentions stilts being worn by the peasants at Arcachon and the neighbourhood near the village, but of these we saw few traces. There were pictures of them in an old print of the _chapelle_ built in 1722, and in a photo of the shepherds of the plains. The photos, indeed, are numerous in the whole country of the Gironde of _anciens costumes_, but when one sets oneself to try and find their counterparts in real life, evidences are practically nil. All that remains of them in these matter-of-fact, levelling days, in which so much that is quaint, characteristic and peculiar is whittled down to one ordinary dead level of alikeness, are the stiff white caps, varied in shape and size, according to the district, and the sabots. Some of the peasants here often go about the streets in woollen bed-slippers, but most of them use wooden sabots--pointed, and with leathern straps over the foot. One gets quite used to the sight of two sabots standing lonely without their inmates in the entrance to some shop, their toes pointing inwards, just as they have been left (as if they were some conveyance or other--in a sense, of course, they are--which is left outside to await the owner's return). Continually the women leave them like this, and proceed to the interior of the shop in their stockinged feet. Sometimes the countrywomen go about without any covering at all to their heads, and it is quite usual to see them thus in church as well as in the streets. The men wear a little round cap, fitting tightly over the head like a bathing cap, and very full, baggy trousers, close at the ankles, dark brown or dark blue as to colour, and very frequently velveteen as to material.