Excepting, perhaps, the famous city of Boulogne-sur-Mer, Pau is the most Anglicised town in France. There are a good many of our countrymen congregated under the old steeples of Tours which every British man should love, were it only for Quentin Durward; but they do not leaven the mass; while in Pau, particularly during the winter time, the main street and the _Place Royale_ look, so far as the passengers go, like slices cut out from Weymouth, Bath, or Cheltenham. You see in an instant the insular cut of the groups, who go laughing and talking the familiar vernacular along the rough _pavé_. There is a tall, muscular hoble-de-hoy, with red hair, high shirt collar, and a lady on each arm--fresh-looking damsels, with flounces, which smack unmistakeably of England. It is a young gentleman with his sisters. Next come a couple of wonderfully well-shaved, well buttoned-up, fat, elderly, half-pay English officers, talking "by Jove, sir," of "Wilkins of ours;" and "by George, sir," of what the "old Duke had said to Galpins of the 9th. at the United Service." An old fat half-pay officer is always a major. I do not know how it happens, but so it is; and when you meet them settled abroad, ten to one they have been dragged there by their wives and daughters. "By Jove, sir!" said one of these veterans to me at Pau--he was very confidential over a glass of brandy and water at the _café_ on the _Place_--"By Jove, sir, for myself, I'd never like to go further from Pall Mall than just down Whitehall, to set my watch by the Horse Guards' clock; but the women, you know, sir, have a confounded hankering for these confounded foreign places; and, by Jove, sir, what is an old fellow who wants a quiet life to do, sir?" The colony of our country folks at Pau keep, as usual, very much together, and try to live in the most English fashion they may; ask each other mutually to cut mutton; display joints instead of _plats_, and import their own sherry; pass half their time studying _Galignani_, and reading to each other long epistles of news and chat from England--the majors and other old boys clustering together like corks in a tub of water; the young people getting up all manner of merry pic-nics and dances, and any body who at all wishes to be in the set, going decorously to the weekly English service. "_Tenez_," said a Pau shopkeeper to me; "your countrymen enjoy here all the luxuries of England. They have even an episcopal chapel and a pack of fox-hounds."