We did not leave St. Emilion until twilight had fallen, and there was no light to see anything else. Then there was a little loitering about to be done, while we waited for the local omnibus which plied between Libourne and St. Emilion. There was very little room inside when we at last boarded it, but we presently overtook, a belated and garrulous _voyageur_, a weather-beaten countryman who talked to me without cessation during the whole journey. I was not sitting next to him, but that did not seem to deter him in the least; he talked insistently, loudly and urgently, leaning across the lap of the man who sat between us. He insisted on taking for granted that all the other passengers were near relations of mine, and asked questions as to ages, names, place of residence, etc., in strident tones, till the man beside me was convulsed with laughter. I have never known a conversation all on one side (for, after the first, none of us attempted to put in a word) kept up, intermittently, for forty minutes on end, as this was! Once before, I own, I succeeded in conversing for ten whole minutes entirely off my own bat, with no assistance from the opposite side, with a young Hawaiian friend of my uncle's who was dining at the house in which I was staying, but that was really in self-defence, because I dared not venture with him across the borders of the English language, having heard specimens of his conversation before, and never having been able to distinguish his nouns from his verbs, or his adverbs from his interjections! But though mutual understanding was difficult, there was yet between us that curious tacit sympathy which is independent of any words. At last we reached Libourne, with a minute to spare for catching our train, and happily succeeded in boarding it. Just outside Libourne we could see great bunches of yellow bananas hanging up outside the cottage walls. The trees here were the softest carmine, mixed with others of burnt sienna, while some resembled nothing so much as a new door-mat. After Luxé begin the little low walls of loose stones separating meadow from meadow and then, later, a flat, dull-coloured stretch of country. On Ruffec platform the garment which the men here seemed most to affect was a sort of dark puce loose coat, with little pleats down the front. The women wore a sort of close lace cap, with streamers floating over their shoulders. Out in the open again we came upon alternate dark green of broom and cloth of gold of foliage everywhere. The curtain of heavy cloud had lifted a little, and beneath shone a gorgeous flame sunset low over meadows of red-brown soil, the darker brick-red of dying bracken over the cold grey of the cottages, and the white gleam of the twisting stream winding in and out between the meadows. CHAPTER VIII