A man told me that once he slept in a bedroom abroad which had eleven doors. Three or four of them opened into large _salons_. Then, too, there is so often a difficulty about the keys of the emergency (?) doors. In most cases that I remember there were no keys; either they had never been fitted with them, or else they had been found to be a superfluity and lost. And all the precaution the occupier of the room could take against invasion was a diminutive little bolt, too weak and flimsy to be of any real use. I remember sleeping once in a room of this sort, where the doors were innocent of any locks or keys, and my companion and I took the precaution, therefore, before retiring to rest, of piling up a tower (which would have been a tower of Babel had it fallen!) of all sorts and kinds of articles. It reached, I think, almost to the top of the door. In the morning, roused by the knock of the chambermaid, we only just remembered in time, after calling out the customary permission to her to enter, to rescind that permission. This last proved indeed a saving clause for her, as the door opened outwards! The bedroom at Bordeaux had three doors. And the proprietor and chambermaid to whom we showed our dissatisfaction at there being, as usual, no keys, evidently considered us very childish to make a fuss over such a trifle. Some other gentleman was sleeping next door, and I furtively tried the bolt which was on our side, to see if it was pushed as far as it would go. This roused the proprietor's wrath, as he declared the gentleman was one of his oldest customers, and had been in bed some hours! After quieting him down, we barricaded the doors in such ways as were possible to us, after his and the chambermaid's departure, and, retiring to rest, passed an uneventful night. The next morning we made tracks for Arcachon. CHAPTER II To go to Arcachon in autumn is to have spread before one's eyes, for almost the entire journey, a perfect feast of colour. I never in my life saw such a magnificent revel of tints massed together in profusion, scattered broadcast over the country so lavishly and unstintingly, as passed rapidly before my eyes that day. The vivid yellow of dwarf acacias; the brilliant crimson of some of the vines; the dazzling gold of others; the dark sombre, olive green of the dwarf pine-trees flecked here and there with splashes of vivid chrome yellow from the embroidery on their bark of some lichen; here and there a high ledge of thorn trees of pronounced terra-cotta. The prevailing note of colour everywhere was a deep russet; in some places merging into brilliant orange, picked out in sharp contrast with the pale yellow leaves of the acacia, and the fainter speckling of those of the silver birch, clear against the white glare of its trunk.