apparently, hitting my blood-thirsty enemies, and only now and then occasionally sinking into a momentary doze to be roused by that loud, clear trumpet of war--the very music of spite and pique and greediness of blood, circling round and round in the darkness, and ever coming nearer and nearer, till at last it ceased, and then came--the bite, as regularly as the applause after the cavatina of a prima donna. I made my appearance next morning, looking exactly as if I had been attacked in the night by measles, the mumps, swollen face, and erysipelas. Between Aigues-Mortes and Lunel, there is no public vehicle, because there is no travelling public; and so I hired a ricketty, shandry-dan looking affair, to take me on; and away we started, under a perfect blaze of hot, sickly sunshine. The road ran due south, through the vineyards and olives, but they gradually faded away as the soil got more and more spongy, and presently we saw before us a waste of the same sort as that which I have described on approaching the sea by the Canal du Midi. Shallow pools, salt marshes, and bulrush jungles, lay flat and silent, glaring in the sunshine--the watchful crane, the sole living creature to be seen amid these desolate swamps. It struck me that John Bunyan, had he ever seen a landscape like this strange, stagnant expanse of dreariness, would have made grand use of it in that great prose poem of his. Perhaps he would have called it "Dead Corpse Land," or the Slough--not of Despond, but of Despair. Presently we found the road running upon a raised embankment, with two great lakes, spotted with rushy islands on either hand, and before us a grim, grey tower, with an ancient gateway--the gates or portcullis long since removed, but a Gothic arch still spanning the roughly-paved causeway. As we rattled beneath it, two or three lounging _douaniers_ came forth, and looked lazily at us; and presently we saw the grey walls of Aigues-Mortes rising, massive and square, above the level lines of the marshes, fronted by one lone minaret, called the "Tower of Constance"--a gloomy steeple-prison, where, in the time of the Camisards, a crowd of women were confined--the wives and daughters of the brave Protestants of the Cevennes, who fought their country inch by inch against the dragoons of Louis Quatorze, and who--the prisoners, I mean--were forced to swallow poison by the agents of that right royal and religious king, the pious hero and Champion of the Faith, as it is in the Vatican. Outside the town looks like a mere fortification--you see nothing but the sweep of the massive walls reflected in the stagnant waters which lie dead around them. Not a house-top appears above the ramparts. It is only by the thin swirlings of the wood-fire smoke that you know that human life exists behind that blank and dreary veil of stone. We entered by a deep Gothic arch, and found ourselves in narrow, gloomy, silent streets, the houses grey and ghastly, and many ruinous and deserted.