The novelty of a population upon stilts--men, women, and children, spurning the ground, and living habitually four or five feet higher than the rest of mankind--irresistibly takes the imagination, and I leant anxiously from the carriage to catch the first glimpse of a Landean in his native style. I looked long in vain. We passed hut after hut, but they seemed deserted, except that the lean swine burrowing round the turf walls gave evidence that the pork had proprietors somewhere. At last I was gratified; as the train passed not very quickly along a jungle of bushes and coppice-wood, a black, shaggy figure rose above it, as if he were standing upon the ends of the twigs. The effect was quite eldritch. We saw him but as a vision, but the high conical hat with broad brims, like Mother Red-cap's, the swarthy, bearded face, and the rough, dirty sheep-skin, which hung fleecily from the shoulders of the apparition, haunted me. He was come and gone, and that was all. Presently, however, the natives began to heave in sight in sufficient profusion. There were three gigantic-looking figures stalking together across an expanse of dusky heath. I thought them men, and rather tall ones; but my companions, more accustomed to the sight, said they were boys on comparatively short stilts, herding the sheep, which were scattered like little greyish stones all over the waste. Anon, near a cottage, we saw a woman, in dark, coarse clothes, with shortish petticoats, sauntering almost four feet from the ground, and next beheld at a distance, and on the summit of a sand-ridge, relieved against the sky, three figures, each leaning back, and supported, as it seemed, not only by two daddy long-legs' limbs, but by a third, which appeared to grow out of the small of their backs. The phenomenon was promptly explained by my bloused _cicerone_, who seemed to feel especial pleasure at my interest in the matter. The third leg was a pole or staff the people carry, with a new moon-shaped crutch at the top, which, applied to the back, serves as a capital prop. With his legs spread out, and his back-stay firmly pitched, the shepherd of the Landes feels as much at home as you would in the easiest of easy chairs. "He will remain so for hours, without stirring, and without being wearied," said my fellow-passenger. "It is a way of sitting down in the Landes. Why, a shepherd, could stand so, long enough to knit a pair of stockings, ay, and not have an ache in his back. Sometimes they play cards, so, without once coming off their stilts." "Ay, and cheat! _Mon Dieu!_ how they cheat!" said the Bordeaux gentleman. The native of the Landes reluctantly admitted that was the truth, and the other went on:--