It is difficult to realise in the Médoc that the best wine in the world is made in places where there is no tall chimney or hideous range of manufactories. All that one sees is a two-storey country-house, with pointed towers at each end, standing in green vineyard slopes, with somewhere in the background a group of inoffensive and often picturesque houses, painted pink, or some other frivolous colour, and not taking up as much room as the stables and yards at big houses in England. It is the extraordinary independence of grapes that gives this simplicity in wine-making. They do the whole thing themselves, only demanding to be let alone; and not all the tall chimneys in England could coerce them into fermenting a day faster than they choose, or could give them any better flavour than their own laws decree. We had only one specimen of what is commonly felt to be landscape, and is spoken of as scenery, as opposed to mere contour, on our way to Pauillac. It was at a place on the right bank of the river, where the shore suddenly reared itself into cliffs of a sunny fawn colour, and apparently of a texture that was eminently suited for house building; so supremely, in fact, that the people of the place had not troubled themselves to cart it away, but had come, like Mohammed, to the mountain, and had blasted themselves out houses in it, and apparently finished them off with their penknives, or teaspoons, or any other implement that was convenient. Some people decorated the front of their cliff very handsomely with carved balustrades and porches; others merely tidied down the rock a little round the windows, and helped out the angles here and there, and put chimneys on handy protuberances. It must have its points as a system of living; when, for instance, the house is crowded for a wedding or a dance, they can dig out a few more spare rooms towards the front, and throw the stuff out of the windows. The rock cuts as easily as wood, and becomes perfectly hard in the air; it is absolutely ideal in all useful respects, and in colour is beautiful, so cheerful and so tempered. We saw these tawny cliffs behind us for a long time, while the boat made her way into the broader flood of the Gironde. The sun made much of them as it sank, and their warm, friendly faces looked still after us in the twilight, when the west was glowing darkly, and the cold wind was forcing us to tramp to and fro in the short span of the deck till we were giddy.