Passing out from Libourne, we reach the very heart of this wine-growing country--a true country of the south it seems in summer, with the endless stretches of vineyards--row after row of green, twisting, climbing wreaths round their stiff, straight poles, under a blazing southern sky, and every now and then a single hill rising suddenly out of the plain, whilst the river slips quietly away in the distance to the sea. On, or rather in, one of these hills the hermit Émilion fixed his cave-dwelling, far back in the legendary years of history; and now--strange contrast!--the town founded by this ascetic, abstemious saint owes its fame to the purple juice of the grape, and sends forth from its slopes not water from his dripping well, but good red wine to gladden the heart of man. A visitor to Saint-Émilion in early summer will find a curious greenness over everything--not only in the freshness of the vineyards. When evening falls the very labourers rise from their task and move home through the dusk like so many green spectres--though from no other cause than from their constant watering of the vines with sulphur-water to kill off the devouring insects. [Illustration: BORDEAUX] Irrespective of wine-growers, Saint-Émilion has many things to be seen on its crescent-shaped hill. There is the wonderful church, carved out of the cliff-face, now in ruins, but possessing store enough of massive square piers and round-headed arches to bear witness to its ancient grandeur; and a separate Gothic tower and spire of the twelfth century points a long tapering finger above the narrow creeper-grown streets and low, crowded roofs on the hill-side. The church to which the tower really belongs is not this curious monument carved from the rock, but the collegiate church farther up the hill, now used as a parish church. Other monuments there are besides--the icy-cold, moss-grown vault known as the “Grotte de Saint-Émilion,” where superstitious maidens drop pins into the well to find out when they shall be married; the ruined convent of the Cordeliers, with its grass-grown courts and ivy-covered cloister arcades, and the great walnut tree whose branches shade an empty, silent place where once the brothers chanted and the novices worked at their simple tasks; and the cave-dwellings, where seven of the Girondists hid from the wrath of the Terror, sheltered and fed by a kindly couple who paid later for their good nature by the guillotine, after four of the seven refugees had been captured and executed. The ancient Saint-Émilion--the town to which most of these buildings carry us back--is in reality an old English fortress, growing from the oppidum of the Gauls to the fortified stronghold which passed to Edward I. and continued, with a few interruptions, to enjoy the privileges of a royal borough of England until the fifteenth century. Chapter Sixteen SENS, AUXERRE, AND TROYES