One old woman, with a faded green pin-cushion on her head, tied with black tape over her striped handkerchief, a broad red handkerchief over her shoulders, and carrying coils of ropes, was ubiquitous. One met her everywhere, and she carried her own perfume thick upon her wherever she went, but she always left sufficient behind in her own particular booth to keep up its character and special personal note. As I left the excited, jabbering crowd, a countrywoman, seeing the prey about to make its escape, darted out from her stall and seized me by the shoulder, pressing on me at the same time two large fish arranged on a cabbage leaf. I came along the quay side later in the evening and all the sails--I mean the booths--were furled, carriage umbrella and all; and the low row of furled umbrellas, standing asleep and casting long dark shadows in the dim light, like so many owls, gave a quaint, extraordinary effect to the whole scene. In the daytime it is difficult to imagine a finer, more striking effect than the quay side, and the stone buildings, most of them with crests over the doorway, fine ironwork balconies, and jalousied windows. The two ancient gates: La Porte du Cailha, and La Porte de l'hotel de Ville, standing solemn, grim and grey, aloof (how could it be otherwise?) from the modern life of to-day, its trams, its tin trumpets, its electric lights--but permitting in its dignified isolation, the traffic which has revolutionised the entire neighbourhood. Most of the old part of Bordeaux is near the quay side. There are many delightful old houses in Rue Quai-Bourgeois, Rue de la Halle, Rue Porte des Pontanets, Rue de la Fusterie, Rue St. Croix and others. The poetry of past ages, past doings, past individualities, is thick in the air as one passes down these narrow, dimly-lighted, old-world streets. Stories of adventures, of dark deeds, of sudden disappearances, are no longer so difficult to picture when one has stood under these long, broad doorways, in the darkest and most sombre of entrance halls, and seen dim, hardly distinguishable staircases away in the shadow beyond. The only sounds that break on one's ear are the dull, booming drone of the steamer away in the harbour, the loose, uneven rattle of the cumbrous waggons over the cobbles; and, when that has passed, the quick tap-tap perhaps of some stray foot-passenger's sabots. Illustration: [_From Collection of Mr Gustavus A. Sieveking._ BORDEAUX, 1842. [_Page 80._ This district of Bordeaux is full of the narrow, winding alleys, which further north we call "wynds:"--all narrow; the houses, abutting them on either side, being mostly five stories high, with all the lower windows barred, and "squints" on each side of the doorways. In front of each house stretches a little strip of pathway about two feet in breadth, tiled diagonally; token of the time when everyone was bound to subscribe thus to the duties of public paving.