Arthur Young, a great traveller, an agriculturist, and a writer of repute, passed this way in 1787. He made a good many true and just observations, more or less at hazard, of things French, and some others that were not so just. The following can hardly be literally true, and if true by no means proves that Jacques Bonhomme is not as good a man as his cousin John Bull, nor even that he is not as well nourished. "_Chacun à son gout!_" He said, writing of the operation of getting dinner at his inn: "I saw them preparing the soup, the colour of which was not inviting; ample provision of cabbage, grease and water, and about as much meat, for a score of people, as half a dozen Suffolk farmers would have eaten, and grumbled at their host for short commons." What a condemnation to be sure, and what an unmerited one! The receipt is all right, as far as it goes, but he should have added a few leeks, a couple of carrots and an onion or two, and then he would have composed a _bouilli_ as fragrant and nourishing as the Englishman's chunks of blood-red beef he is for ever talking about. Our "agriculturist" only learned half his lesson, and could not recite it very well at that. In the midst of a great plain lying between Saint-Palais, Saint-Jean-Pied-de-Port and Bayonne, perhaps fifty kilometres south of the left bank of the Adour, are the neighbouring little towns of Iholdy and Armendarits. The former is the market town of a vast, but little populated, canton, and a village as purely rustic and simple as one could possibly imagine. Iholdy and its few unpretentious little shops and its quaint unworldly little hotel caters only to a thin population of sheep and pig growers, and their wants are small, save when they go afield to Peyrehorade, St. Jean or Bayonne. One eats of the products of the country here, and enjoys them, too, even if mutton, lamb and little pig predominate. The latter may or may not be thought a delicacy, but certainly it was better here than was ever met with before by the writer of these lines; and no prejudice prevented a second helping. Armendarits, Iholdy's twin community, saw the birth of Renaud d'Elissagory, who built what was practically the first gunboat. The birthplace of "_Petit Renaud_," as he was, and is still, affectionately called, the inventor of _galiotes à bombes_, is still inhabited and reckoned as one of the sights of these parts. CHAPTER XXIV THE BIRTH OF FRENCH NAVARRE [Illustration] Basse-Navarre or Navarre-Française, together with Béarn, made, under the Emperor Hadrian, a part of Aquitaine.