So attired, then, with a gourd containing some wretched _piquette_ hung across his shoulders, and provided with a store of rye-bread, baked, perhaps, three weeks before, a few dry sardines, and as many onions or cloves of garlic, the Landes shepherd sallies forth into the wilderness. He reckons himself a rich man, if his employer allows him, over and above his food, sixty francs a-year. From the rising to the setting of the sun, he never touches the ground, shuffling backwards and forwards on his stilts, or leaning against a pine, plying the never-pausing knitting-needle. Sometimes he drives his flock home at eventide; sometimes he bivouacs in the wild. Unbuckling his stilts, and producing his flint and steel, he has soon a rousing fire of fir-branches, when, gathering his sheep-skins round him, he makes himself comfortable for the night, his only annoyances being the mosquitoes and the dread of the cantrips of some unchancy old lady, who may peradventure catch a glimpse of him in the moonlight, as she rides buxomly on her besom to a festal dance in a devil's garden. "Yet still," continued the young priest, "they are a good, honest-hearted, open-handed people. For their wild, solitary life they have a passionate love. The Landes peasant, taken from his dreary plains, and put down in the richest landscape of France, would pine for his heath, and sand, and woods, like a Swiss for his hills. But they seldom leave their home here in the forests. They live and die in the district where they were born, ignorant and careless of all that happens beyond their own lonely bounds. France may vibrate with revolution and change--the shepherds of the Landes feel no shock, take no heed, but pursue the daily life of their ancestors, perfectly happy and contented in their ignorance, driving their sheep, or notching their trees in the wilderness." CHAPTER VI. UP THE GARONNE--THE OLD WARS ON ITS BANKS--ITS BOATS AND ITS SCENERY--AGEN--JASMIN, THE LAST OF THE TROUBADOURS--SOUTHERN COOKERY AND GARLIC--THE BLACK PRINCE IN A NEW LIGHT--A DREARY PILGRIMAGE TO PAU.