The first-class passengers maintained their attitude of suspicion as far as we were concerned; and when, after a period of discreet inoffensiveness, a sketch-book was called into requisition, they began to be quite sure that we were as objectionable as our clothing, and discussed us in groups, with such lightning side-glances as only French eyes can give. For a little time an intermittent procession of men strolled in an elaborately casual manner round behind the sketch-book; but, finding themselves rewarded only by Arcadian glimpses of cattle, trees, and churches, they gradually settled down on their chairs again, and smoked the mysterious compound known to the French middle-classes as tobacco, while the cattle and the churches retired into the desert places of the sketch-book, and the page with the fat _curé_, his still fatter friend, and the insatiably curious little boy, came to light again. For the first half of the journey the steamer made her way down the river on the principle of Billy Malowny’s exit from the wake, when ‘it wasn’t so much the length of the road come agin him as the breadth.’ Every house on each bank seemed to have a landing-place of its own, and a passenger to be landed at it; we crossed and recrossed, as if we were beating to windward, and the Bordeaux merchants and bank clerks returned by scores to the bosoms of their families, and were no doubt epigrammatic at dinner on the subject of the two absurdly emancipated _Anglaises_, with their sailor hats and brown shoes. At all events, we were getting our first impressions of the Médoc slowly and thoroughly. We were in the thick of the Vine Country by this time; everywhere, as far as we could see, the low slopes were seamed and striped with vines till they looked like green corduroy, and every large house among them was a _château_, with a name more or less familiar even to the ignorant and unlearned. We had a map of the Médoc with us--a map that gave all the _châteaux_ in heavy capitals, and added the towns as trivial necessities in diamond type; it sometimes even gave a little picture of a particularly pet _château_ so that there might be no mistake about it. From this we identified the Château Margaux, the home of one of the four kings of the classified Médoc wines, sharing its select first-class with Lafite, Latour, and Haut-Brion, behind whom trails the sacred list of the classified, down to the fifth estate and after that the deluge of the _bourgeois_ wines, most of which are good enough for any one, but are not quite of the blood royal.