Remembering Henri Quatre's first beverage, I had no objection. The wine, which is white, tastes a good deal like a rough _chablis_, and is very deceptive, and very heady: I would advise new-comers to the Pyrenees to use it but gingerly. The garrison of Pau was changed while I was there, and the new soldiers were going rolling about the streets--some of them madly drunk, from the effects of this fireily intoxicating, yet mildly tasting wine. Our road lay along the Gave--a flashing, sparkling mountain-stream, running amid groups of trees, luxuriant coppice-wood, and small fields of yellow Indian corn. Many were the cottages and clusters of huts, half-hidden amid the vines, which are trailed in screens and tunnels from stake to stake, and tree to tree; and, on each side of the way, hedges of box-wood, growing in luxuriant thickets, which would delight the heart of an English gardener--gave note of one of the characteristic natural harvests of the Pyrenees. The soil and the climate are, indeed, such, that the place which, in more northern mountain regions, would be occupied by furze and heather, is hereabouts taken up by perfect thickets and jungles of thriving box-wood; while the laurel and rhododendron grow in bushy luxuriance. Charming, however, as is the landscape, and thoroughly poetic the first aspect of the cottages, they are in reality wretched, ricketty, and unwholesome hovels. In fact, poor huts, and a mountain country, go almost invariably together. In German Switzerland, the cottages are miserable; and every body knows what an unwindowed stye is a Highland turf-built bothy. So of the Pyrenean cottages: many of them--mere hovels of wood and clay, so rickety-looking, that one wonders that the first squall from the hills does not carry them bodily away--are composed of one large, irregular room, having an earthen floor, with black, smoky beams stretching across beneath the thatch. Two or three beds are made up in the darkest corners; festoons of Indian corn, onions, and heads of garlic are suspended from the rafters; and opposite the huge open fireplace is generally placed the principal piece of furniture of the apartment--a lumbering pile of a dresser, garnished with the crockery of the household. In a very great proportion of cases, the windows of these dwellings are utterly unglazed; and when the rough, unpainted outside shutters are closed, the whole interior is in darkness. The people, however, seem better fed and better clothed than the German Switzers. In the vicinity of Pau, the women wear the brightest silk handkerchiefs on their heads, are perfectly dissipated in the matter of gaudy ribbons, and cut their petticoats of good, fleecy, home-spun stuff, so short as to display a fair modicum of thick rig-and-furrow worsted stockings. The men, except that they wear a blue bonnet--flat, like that called Tam O'Shanter in Scotland--are decently clad in the ordinary blouse. It is