The French highroad turns northwest at Bourg-Madame, and via Porta and Porté and the Tour de Carol--perhaps a relic of the Moors, but more likely a reminder of Charlemagne, who chased them from these parts--one comes to Hospitalet, from which point one enters Andorra by crossing the main chain of the Pyrenees at the Col de Puymorins. "A beggarly village," wrote a traveller of Hospitalet, just previous to the Revolution, "with a shack of an inn that made me almost shrink. Some cutthroat figures were eating black bread, and their faces looked so much like galley-slaves that I thought I heard their chains rattle. I looked at their legs, but found them free." There's good material here for a novel of adventure, or was a hundred years ago, but now the still humble inn of Hospitalet is quiet and peaceful. [Illustration: arms of Andorra] The little republic of Andorra, hidden away in the fastnesses of the Pyrenees between France and Spain, its allegiance divided between the Bishop of Urgel in Spain and the French Government, is a relic of mediævalism which will probably never fall before the swift advance of twentieth century ideas of progress. At least it will never be over-run by automobiles. From French or Spanish territory this little unknown land is to be reached by what is called a "_route carrossable_," but the road is so bad that the sure-footed little donkeys of the Pyrenees are by far the best means of locomotion unless one would go up on foot, a matter of twenty kilometres or more from Hospitalet in Spanish or Porté in French territory. This is a good place to remark that the donkeys of the Pyrenees largely come from Spain, but curiously enough the donkeys and mules of Spain are mostly bred in the Vendée, just south of the Loire, in France. The political status of Andorra is most peculiar, but since it has endured without interruption (and this in spite of wars and rumours of war) for six centuries, it seems to be all that is necessary. A relic of the Middle Ages, Andorra-Viella, the city, and its six thousand inhabitants live in their lonesome retirement much as they did in feudal times, except for the fact that an occasional newspaper smuggled in from France or Spain gives a new topic of conversation.