utterly poor, starved, and meagre-looking growths, allowing, as they do, the gravelly soil to show in bald patches of grey shingle through the straggling branches--these contemptible-looking shrubs, like paralysed and withered raspberries, it is which produce the most priceless, and the most inimitably flavoured wines. Such are the vines which grow Chateau Margaux at half a sovereign the bottle. The grapes themselves are equally unpromising. If you saw a bunch in Covent Garden you would turn from them with the notion that the fruiterer was trying to do his customer, with over-ripe black currants. Lance's soul would take no joy in them, and no sculptor in his senses would place such meagre bunches in the hands and over the open mouths of his Nymphs, his Bacchantes, or his Fauns. Take heed, then, by the lesson, and beware of judging of the nature of either men or grapes by their looks. Meantime, let us continue our survey of the country. No fences or ditches you see--the ground is too precious to be lost in such vanities--only, you observe from time to time a rudely carved stake stuck in the ground, and indicating the limits of properties. Along either side of the road the vines extend, utterly unprotected. No raspers, no ha-ha's, no fierce denunciations of trespassers, no polite notices of spring guns and steel traps constantly in a state of high go-offism--only, when the grapes are ripening, the people lay prickly branches along the way-side to keep the dogs, foraging for partridges among the espaliers, from taking a refreshing mouthful from the clusters as they pass; for it seems to be a fact that everybody, every beast, and every bird, whatever may be his, her, or its nature in other parts of the world, when brought among grapes, eats grapes. As for the peasants, their appetite for grapes is perfectly preposterous. Unlike the surfeit-sickened grocer's boys, who, after the first week loathe figs, and turn poorly when sugar-candy is hinted at, the love of grapes appears literally to grow by what it feeds on. Every garden is full of table vines. The people eat grapes with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper, and between breakfast, lunch, dinner, and supper. The labourer plods along the road munching a cluster. The child in its mother's arms is tugging away with its toothless gums at a bleeding bunch; while as for the vintagers, male and female, in the less important plantations, Heaven only knows where the masses of grapes go to, which they devour, labouring incessantly at the _metier_, as they do, from dawn till sunset.