"These fellows here on the stilts are the most confounded gamblers in Europe. Men and women, it's all the same--play, play, play; they would stake their bodies first, and their souls after. _Tenez_; I once heard of a lot of the fellows playing in a wood till they were all but starved. In the day they played by daylight, and when night came, they kindled a bonfire and played in the glare. They played on and on, in spite of hunger and thirst. They staked their money--not that they had much of that--and their crops--not that they were of great value either--and their pigs, and their sheep, and their Landes ponies, and then their furniture, and then their clothes, and, last of all, their stilts--for a Landes man thinks his stilts the principal part of his wardrobe; and, _sacré!_ monsieur, three of the fellows were ruined out and out, and had to give up their hats, and sheep-skins, and sabots, while the man who was the greatest winner walked home on his own stilts, with the stilts of all his comrades tucked under his arm." "Gaming is their fault--their great fault," meekly acknowledged the blouse. "Not at all!" said his antagonist. "Cheating is their great fault. A Landes shepherd would cheat the devil with a greasy pack of cards." "The fact is," replied the apologist, "that they count cheating part of the game. Their motto is, win anyhow; so it is no worse for one than the other. Cards is chance; but cheating needs skill, and _voila tout_." We were fast approaching Teste, and had passed two or three clusters of poor huts, and a party of women up to their waists in a sluggish stream washing fleeces, while yellow patches of ripening maize began to recur quicker and quicker, showing that we had reached a comparatively thickly-peopled district, when all at once there burst upon my eyes a glorious-looking prairie of gently undulating land, of the brightest green I ever looked upon. The green of the greenest lawns of England, the green of the softest bogs of Ireland, the green even of the most intensely green patches of the Curragh of Kildare, were brown, and fuzzy, and rusty, compared to this wonderful hue. The land looked like one huge emerald, sparkling in the sun. The brightness, the freshness, the radiance of the tint, was almost supernatural, and the eye, nursed for it, as it were, after our journey over the brown moors and black pines, caught the bright fresh beauty of the colour with rapture.