This has been the fate of Labastide-Ville-franche in Béarn. One traces readily enough the outlines of the original _bastide_, but more than all else marvels at the great, four-storied donjon tower, planned by the father of the illustrious Gaston Phoebus of Foix. This sentinel tower stood at the juncture of the principalities of Béarn, Bidache and Navarre. Gaston Phoebus finished this great donjon with the same generous hand with which he endowed everything he touched, and it ranks among the best of its era wherever found. The _bastide_ and its dependencies grew up around the foot of this tower, but there is nothing else to give the little town--or more properly village--any distinction whatever; it still remains merely a delightful old-world spot, endowed with a charming situation. It calls itself a _rendezvous commercial_, but beyond being a cattle-market of some importance, thanks to its being the centre of a spider's web of roads, not many outside the immediate neighbourhood have ever heard its name mentioned, or seen it in print. In this same connection it is to be noted that all of Béarn and the Basque provinces are celebrated for their cattle. What Arabia is to the horse, the Pyrenean province of Béarn, more especially the gracious valley of Barétous, called the "Jardin de Béarn," is to the bovine race. Another delightful, romantic corner of Béarn is the valley of the Aspe. Urdos is its principal town, and here one sees ancient customs as quaint as one is likely to find hereabouts. Urdos is but a long-drawn-out, one-street village along the banks of the Gave d'Aspe, but it is lively and animated with all the gaiety of the Latin life. On a fête day omnibuses, country carts, donkeys, mules and even oxen bring a very respectable crowd to town, and there is much merry-making of a kind which knows not modern amusements in the least degree. Continuous dancing,--all day and all night--interspersed with eating and drinking suffices. Something of the sort was going on, the author and artist thought, when they arrived at five on a delightful June day; but no, it was nothing but the marriage feast of a local official, and though all the rooms of the one establishment which was dignified by the name of a hotel were taken, shelter was found at an humble inn kept by a worthy widow. She certainly was worthy, for she charged for dinner, lodging, and coffee in the morning, for two persons, but the small sum of six francs and didn't think the automobile, which was lodged in the shed with the sheep and goats and cows, was an excuse for sticking on a single sou. She was more than worthy; she was gentle and kind, for when a fellow traveller, a French Alpinist, would find a guide to show him the way across the mountain on the morrow, and so on down into the Val d'Ossau, she expostulated and told him that the witless peasant he had engaged to show him the road had never been, to her knowledge, out of his own commune.