The olives of France, this gentleman informed me, are very inferior to the trees of a couple of generations ago. Towards the close of the last century, there was a winter night of intense frost; and when the morning broke, the trees were nearly smitten to the core. That year there was not an olive gathered in Provence or Languedoc. The next season, some of the stronger and younger trees partially revived, and slips were planted from those to which the axe had been applied; but the entire species of the tree, he assured me, had fallen off--had dwindled, and pined, and become stunted; and the profits of olive cultivation had faded with it. The gentleman spoke on the subject with a degree of unction which would have suited the fall, not of the olive, but of man. It was a catastrophe which coloured his whole life. He was himself an olive proprietor; and very likely his fortunes fell on the fatal night as many points as the thermometer. On our way to Lunel we saw the olive-gathering just beginning; but, alas! it had none of the gaiety and bright associations of the vintage. On the contrary, it was as business-like and unexciting as weeding onions, or digging potatoes. A set of ragged peasants--the country people hereabouts are poorly dressed--were clambering barefoot in the trees, each man with a basket tied before him, and lazily plucking the dull oily fruit. Occasionally, the olive-gatherers had spread a white cloth beneath the tree, and were shaking the very ripe fruit down; but there was neither jollity nor romance about the process. The olive is a tree of association, but that is all. Its culture, its manuring, and clipping, and trimming, and grafting--the gathering of its fruits, and their squeezing in the mill, when the ponderous stone goes round and round in the glutinous trough, crushing the very essence out of the oily pulps--while the fat, oleaginous stream pours lazily into the greasy vessels set to receive it;--all this is as prosaic and uninteresting as if the whole Royal Agricultural Society were presiding in spirit over the operations. And, after all, what could be expected? "Grapes," said a clever Frenchman, "are wine-pills"--the notion of conviviality and mirth is ever attached to them; and the vintagers, when stripping the loaded branches, have their minds involuntarily carried forward to the joyous ultimate results of their labours. But who--our friends the Russians, and their cousins the Esquimaux excepted--could possibly be jolly over the idea of oil? It may act balsamically and soothingly; and the idea of the olive saucer, green amongst the bright decanters, does approach, in some respect, towards the production of a pleasant association of ideas; but still the elevated and poetic feelings connected with the tree are remote and dim.