So I don't see much of my triad of sisters unless accidentally, but last August I encountered them by chance at Vicq d'Azyr. Do you know Vicq d'Azyr? No? All right? when it is known universally it will be spoilt; it will soon be fashionable, dyspeptic, artificial, like the crowds that will flock to it; its warm, bubbling springs will be gathered into long upright glasses, and quaffed by yellow-visaged groups; brass bands will bray where now the thrushes, orioles, and nightingales have the woodlands to themselves; cavalcades of hired hacks will cut up its thyme-covered turf, and young ladies will sketch in tortured outline and miserable washes the glorious sweep of its mountains, the crimson tints of its forests, the rush of its tumbling torrents, the golden gleam of its southern sun. Vicq d'Azyr will be a Spa, and will be spoilt; dyspepsia and bronchia, vanities and flirtations, cares and conquests, physicians and intrigantes, real marchionesses puffing under asthma, fictitious marquises strewing chaff for pigeons, monde and demi-monde, grandes dames and dames d'industrie will float into it, a mighty army of butterflies with a locust power of destruction: Vicq d'Azyr will be no more, and in its stead we shall have--a Fashionable Bath. Vicq d'Azyr, however, is free _yet_ from the hand of the spoiler, and is charming--its vine-clad hills stretching up in sunny slopes; its little homesteads nestling on the mountains' sides among the pines that load the air with their rich heavy perfume; its torrents foaming down the ravines, flinging their snowy spray far over the bows of arbutus and mountain-ash that bend across the brinks of their rushing courses; its dark-eyed peasant girls that dance at sunset under the linden-trees like living incarnations of Florian's pastorals; its sultry brilliant summer nights, when all is still, when the birds are sleeping among the ilex-leaves, and the wind barely stirs the tangled boughs of the woodland; when night is down on the mountains, wrapping hill and valley, crag and forest in one soft purple mist, and the silence around is only broken by the mystic music of the rushing waters, the soft whirr of the night-birds' wings, or the distant chime of a village clock faintly tolling through the air:----Caramba, messieurs! I beg your pardon! I don't know why I poetize on Vicq d'Azyr. _I_ went there to slay, not to sketch, with a rifle, not with a stylus, to kill izzards and chamois, not to indite a poem à la mode, with double-barrelled adjectives, no metre, and a "purpose;" nor to add my quota to the luckless loaded walls of the Academy by a pre-Raphaelite landscape of arsenical green, with the effete trammels of perspective gallantry disregarded, and trees like Dr. Syntax's wife, "roundabout and rather squat," with just two-dozen-and-seven leaves apiece for liberal allowance. I went to Vicq d'Azyr, amongst other places, last August, for chamois-hunting with