As may be conceived, my respected landlord was far more in his element than at home with his wife. He eat more, drank more, talked more, and laughed more than any two men present. Afterwards he grew tender and sentimental, and professed himself to be an ardent lover of his kind--a proposition which I suspect he afterwards narrowed specially in favour of a most mosquito-ridden lady next him--to the high wrath of a waistcoat opposite, who said sarcastic and cutting things, which nobody paid any attention to; and the landlord, being really a good-looking and plausible fellow, went on conquering and to conquer, and drinking and being drunk to; until, under a glorious outburst of moonlight which paled the blinking candles on the table, the merry company broke up; and mine host of Bordeaux, after certain rather unsteady walking, suddenly stopped on the centre of the bridge, and refused to go further until he had told me a secret. This was said with vast solemnity and aplomb, so we paused together on the granite pavement, and, after looking mysteriously at the Garonne, the moon, and the dusky heights of Floriac, my companion informed me in a hoarse whisper that he should leave France, his native and beloved land, where he felt sure that he was not appreciated, and pitch his tent, "_la bas, en Angleterre, parceque les Anglais etaient si bons enfants!_" "So ho!" thought I; "a strange reminiscence of the old Gascons." But on the morrow, my respectable entertainer had a bad headache, a yellow visage, and an entire forgetfulness of how he had got home at all. [Illustration: MOUSTACHE AT THE VINTAGE] CHAPTER II. CLARET--AND THE CLARET COUNTRY. That our worthy forefathers in Guienne loved good wine, is a thing not to be doubted--even by a teetotaller. When the Earl of Derby halted his detachments, he always had a pipe set on broach for the good of the company; and it is to be presumed that he knew their tastes. The wines of the Garonne were also, as might be expected, freely imported into England: "Whit wyn of Oseye, and of Gascoyne, Of the Ruele, and of the Rochel wyn."