Over many of the doors I had noticed little bunches of dead flowers, or bundles of wheat or corn, some in the form of a cross,--hung up. On asking the _femme de chambre_, who brought in our _second déjeuner_ at the little old inn near this gate, she told me that on every festival of St. Jean, the people go to church in large numbers, pass up the aisle carrying these little bunches, and the priest blesses them as they go by, and then on the return home they are hung up over the door of each household, to remain there for the whole of the year until the festival comes round again. To the French, the Idea is everything. To us, it is too often only reverenced according to its money value. Some of the vines at St. Emilion are on banks, on rising ground, flanked by two stone pillars at one end, with an iron gate and a flight of steps, generally deeply mossed, leading up to the vines. Here and there a vivid touch of colour from some fallen leaf, mauve or yellow, lay in strong contrast on the sandy path. There was the flaring yellow of the marigolds, too, which grew plentifully in the banks between the espaliers. A hollowed piece of limestone, for the water to drain off from the vineyards, marked the bank at regular intervals the whole way along. Red and white valerian hung in clustering branches over the edges of the rocks. We spent a long time in the _place du marché_, under the lee of the high earthwork, with holes like burrows set in it at regular intervals on which the superstructure of the newer church is built over the ancient subterranean one. This latter is only opened, we were informed, once a year. The market place, which the modern church overshadows, is a quiet, dreamy, tranquil little square. An acacia was meditatively shedding its garments, in the shape of leaves, on to the little green strip of turf in the middle. Underneath its branches lay already a soft heap of yellow, from its previous exertions. Two travelling pedlars--a man and a woman--were plying on this little lawn a cheerful trade. He was mending the flotsams and jetsams of St. Emilion household crockery and unwarily drinking water from the flowing stream that descends from the tap's mouth. As he mended, he sang snatches of some of those little jaunty, gay, _roulade-y_ songs which the French peasant loves: "_Je marche à soir_," "_Ah! tirez de votre poche un sous!_" were bits that caught my ear most often; perhaps they were meant to be, in a sense, topical songs, with an eye (or a voice) to the main chance. An old woman hobbled across the square bringing an old brown jug to be riveted, and he besought her, as she was going away, to "_cassez une autre_."