half-light of the coffee-room and walked forth to see the town. We went down to the quays and crawled along them in the shade, looking at the immense river, and the long ‘winter woodland’ of masts of all countries, stretching away seemingly to the Bay of Biscay: it did not matter that the water was the colour of _café au lait_, churned to dirty froth by innumerable screws and paddles, or that the hoarse screams of steam whistles ascended through black smoke to the brilliant heavens; all was new and delightful, and of a cheerfulness unknown to the British Isles. It was here that we began to realise what the wine country could do when it gave its mind to it. The great quays were packed close with barrels as far as the eye could follow--barrels on whose ends were hieroglyphs that told of aristocratic birth as plainly as the armorial bearings on a carriage; the streets were full of long narrow carts like ladders on wheels, laden also with barrels, one behind the other; and about every five minutes, as it seemed to us, some big ship moved out from the wharf, filled to the brim with claret, and slipped down the yellow current to other climes. As we sat under the chestnut trees and watched the tide of the traffic, we began to notice that there are more grey horses in France than one would have imagined there could have been in the world. The streets of Paris are mottled by them; the streets of Bordeaux are mottled in the opposite way--that is to say, the dark horses are like specks among the white, and in the Médoc the necessary difficulty of providing black horses for funerals can probably be only solved by blacklead. We carried a map of Bordeaux in our hands, and stopped many times to study it as we strolled along, causing thereby an ecstasy of interest among the sailors and the women sitting at their stalls of strange fruits and fungi. It was disappointing that French wit did not on these occasions elaborate any jest more sparkling than ‘_Ah! Les Anglaises!_’ though the inhabitants seemed to find the humour of the situation satiatingly expressed in this simple formula. Once, in Paris, a butcher’s boy screamed ‘Angleesh spock-en’ after us, and convulsed the whole street with the sally; but we thought that we could have produced something better any day on Patrick’s Bridge, Cork. We perseveringly ciphered out our route to the church of St. Michel, assisted a good deal, it must be admitted, by the fact that its steeple is the tallest thing in Bordeaux. We were getting very hot indeed as we toiled through the Tour de Cailhau--so hot that, as a Galway woman once remarked, ‘it would have been a pleasure to any one to lie down and die,’ and we longed to sit down and rest on the kerbstone in the shade of the Tour beside a man in a blue blouse who was sharpening a razor in his entirely filthy palm.