Every change of season has its corresponding duties to nature, and each one is made the occasion of a festival by the simple folk in all lands. Let the foreigner who wanders into peasant France in the autumn beware of letting himself loose among the grape gatherers. The “_vendange_,” as it is called, is the ceremony of picking these little fruits out of which the native wine is made, and it is during this season that the peasants let themselves go, like children. They dance and they sing and they play practical jokes, the most common being to catch the unwary bystander and rub him with the juice of the _tenturier_, the Spanish grape. There are a certain number of these in every vineyard. They are called the “dyer” grape, and are used to give color to the _petit vin_, and assuredly give a lasting color to the poor victim. After the harvest they all come home in a tumbrel, the noise and laughter in no way indicating the former gruesome use for that vehicle. When you have managed to tear yourself away from this interesting and strange suburb of Paris, and crossed the Seine, should you look back upon the scene of your former pleasures, you will see nothing of the villages with the red-tiled roofs, nothing of the cabbages and beets, indeed, nothing to indicate any human habitation. As far as you know, there is only a solid cliff of Caen stone—the same of which the Louvre is built—pale cream in tone and gray when the air touches it. I once dug my finger-nail into a soft piece of the rock and found it was made of an infinite number of seashells, a veritable paste of dead animals. _II. Barbizon_ On the fringe of the woods of the forest of Fontainebleau is Barbizon. We used to go out here whenever we could, where, at the Hotel Siron there were always dozens of artists gathered together, hoping to pick up one of Millet’s paper collars. Most of the old Barbizon group were dead by the time I got there, but among those left were Frank O’Mara, Naegley, and Hawkins—all Englishmen—and Jameson, brother of the doctor of South African fame; my friends, Ruger Donoho and Charles H. Davis; Butler, who married a daughter of Monet; and Jaques, the well-known French painter of sheep. Jaques was the last of the original French colony.