inferior to that of the bagman, and, with all the coarseness of the barracks clinging to them, frequently cluster together in groups of half-a-dozen--scramble for all that is good upon the table--eat with their caps on, which the _commis voyageur_ only does in winter, when the bare and empty _salle_ is miserably cold--and in general behave with a coarse rudeness, and a tumultuous vulgarity, which I never saw private soldiers guilty of, either here or in France. But I must hurry my Pyrenean sketches to an end. The true South--I mean the Mediterranean-washed provinces--still lie before me; and I must perforce leap almost at a bound over a long and interesting journey through the little-known towns of the eastern Pyrenees--quiet, sluggish, tumble-down places, as St. Gaudens, St. Girons, and St. Foix, possessed neither of pump-rooms, nor warm-springs, but vegetating on, lazily and dreamily, in their glorious climate--for, after all, it does sometimes stop raining, and that for a few blazing months at a time, too. I would like to sketch St. Gaudens, with its broad-eaved, booth-like shops, and the snug town-hall, with pictures of old prefects and wigged _fermiers generaux_, into which they introduced me, and where they set all their municipal documents before me, when I applied for some information as to the landholding of the district. I would like to sketch at length a curious walled village on the head waters of the Garonne--a dead-and-gone sort of place, of which I asked an old man the name. "A poor place, sir," he said; "a poor place. Not worth your while looking at. All poor people here, sir--poor people; not worth your while speaking to. And the name--oh, a poor name, sir--not worth your while knowing; but, if you insist--why, then, it's Valentine." I would like to sketch the merry population in the hills round that dead-and-gone village--half farmers, half weavers, like the Saddleworth peasants, in Yorkshire--a jolly set--all sporting men, too, who give up their looms, and go into the woods after bears as boldly as Sir Peter de Bearne. And I would like, too, to try to bring before my reader's eye the viney valley of the Ariege, and the deep ravines through which the stream goes foaming, spanned by narrow bridges, each with a tower in the centre, where the warder kept his guard, and opened and shut the huge, iron-bound doors, and dropped and raised the portcullis at pleasure. And these old feudal memorials bring me to the castles and ruined towers so thickly peopling the land where lived the bands of adventurers, as Froissart calls them, by whom the fat citizens of the towns were wont to be "_guerroyés et harriés_," and most of which have still their legends of desperate sieges, and, too often, of foul murders done within their dreary walls. Pass, as I perforce must, however, and gain Provence--there is yet one legendary tale I cannot help telling. It is one of the best things in Froissart, and a little twisting would give it