The same tradition that says the Béarnais are rough, irascible spirits, says also that they seek for a summary personal vengeance rather than let the process of law take its course. There's something of philosophy in this, if it's true, but again it is reiterated there are no visible signs that the peasant of Béarn is of the knife-drawing class of humanity to which belong Sicilians and gypsies. The writer on more than one occasion has been stalled in the Pyrenees while blazing an automobile trail up some valley road that he ought not to have attempted, and has found the Béarnais a faithful, willing worker in helping him out of a hole (this is literal), and glad indeed to accept such an honorarium as was bestowed upon him. Nothing of brigandage in this! The passing times change men and manners, and when it is recorded by the préfet of the Basses-Pyrénées that no department ever had so much law-business going on before in its courts, it shows at least that if the Béarnais do have their little troubles among themselves, they are now a law-loving, law-abiding people. They are good livers and drinkers too, of much the same stamp as the gallant Gascons, of whom Dumas wrote. It was in a Béarnais inn that the Prince de Conti saw the following couplet chalked upon the wall: "Je m'apuelle Robineau, Et je bois mon vin sans eaux." Whereupon he added: "Et moi, Prince de Conti, Sans eaux je le bois aussi." The sentiment is not very high; window-pane poetry and the like never does soar; but it is significant of the good living of past and present times in France, and in these parts in particular. The peasant dress of the Béarnais is the same throughout all the communes. They wear a woollen head-dress, something like that of the Basques. It is round, generally brown, and usually drawn down over the left ear in a most _dégagé_ fashion. The student of Paris' Latin Quarter is a poor copy of a Béarnais so far as his cap goes. In some parts of the plain below the foot-hills of the Pyrenees,--around Tarbes for example,--the cap is replaced by a little round hat, a sort of a cross between that sometimes worn by the Breton, and a "bowler" of the vintage of '83. A long blouse-like coat, or jacket, is worn, and woollen breeches and gaiters, of such variegated colouring as appeals to each individual himself. In style the costume of the Béarnais is national; in colour it is anything you like and individual, but mostly brown or gray of those shades which were the progenitors of what we have come to know as khaki. The shepherds and cattle guardians, indeed all of the inhabitants of the higher valleys and slopes, dress similarly, but in stuffs of much coarser texture and heavier weight, and wear quite as much clothing in summer as in the coldest days of winter.