Quite different from the Béarnais are the Bigordans, and, somewhat uncharitably, the latter have a proverb which given in their own tongue is as follows:--"_Béarnès faus et courtès._" Neighbourly jealousy accounts for this. The Béarnais are morose, steady and commercial, the Bigordans lively, bright and active, and their sociability is famed afar. In the open country throughout the Pyrenees, there are three classes of inhabitants, those of the mountains and high valleys, those of the slopes, and those of the plains. The first are hard-working and active, but often ignorant and superstitious; the second are more gay, less frugal and better livers than the mountaineers; and those of the plains are often downright lazy and indolent. The mendicant race, of which old writers told, has apparently disappeared. There are practically no beggars in France except gypsies, and there is no mistaking a gypsy for any other species. In general one can say that the inhabitants of the high Pyrenees are a simple, good and generous people, and far less given to excess than many others of the heterogeneous mass which make up the population of modern France. Simple and commodious and made of the wool of the country are the general characteristics of the costumes of these parts, as indeed they are of most mountain regions. But the distinctive feature, with the men as with the women, is the topknot coiffure. In the plains, the men wear the pancake-like _béret_, and in the high valleys a sort of a woollen bonnet--something like a Phrygian cap. With the women it is a sort of a hood of red woollen stuff, black-bordered and exceedingly picturesque. "_C'est un joli cadre pour le visage d'une jolie femme_," said a fat commercial traveller, with an eye for pretty women, whom the writer met at a Tarbes table d'hôte. A writer of another century, presumably untravelled, in describing the folk of the Pyrenees remarked: "The Highlanders of the Pyrenees put one in mind of Scotland; they have round, flat caps and loose breeches." Never mind the breeches, but the _béret_ of the Basque is no more like the tam-o'-shanter of the Scot than is an anchovy like a herring. An English traveller once remarked on the peculiar manner of transport in these parts in emphatic fashion. "With more sense than John Bull, the Pyrenean carter knows how to build and load his wagon to the best advantage," he said. He referred to the great carts for transporting wine casks and barrels, built with the hind wheels much higher than the front ones. It's a simple mechanical exposition of the principle that a wagon so built goes up-hill much easier.