Shutters in the Médoc are serious affairs, impregnable barriers that are fastened irrevocably outside the windows, and admit neither air nor light. Neither do they admit mosquitoes; but we had so far seen none such, and we resolved to risk them, and sleep with the windows open. The mosquitoes forbore--perhaps we were caviare to their countrified tastes, or perhaps they missed the usual seasoning of garlic; but the sunshine that flamed in our windows at some six of the Waterbury (I have not mentioned before that my cousin is attached to a Waterbury watch by a leather strap) had no scruples in the matter. To slumber with the Médoc sun full on one’s face is an art that takes some learning, and the first angry rift in the delicious sleep that French wool mattresses and spring beds induce was broadened to a wide-awake torture by a series of rasping, whistling screeches from the street below, that made us grind our teeth, and remember every slate pencil that had ever squeaked on a slate. It was a matter that required instant investigation, and it was not a little startling to find a party of stonemasons perched like birds upon a scaffolding exactly opposite our windows, manipulating monster blocks of the creamy stone out of which they build everything in these parts. They were sawing and shaping these symmetrical blocks down in the street as easily as if they were cheese, and in time we became able to bear that iron screech of the saws tearing their way through the gritty stone; indeed, it now lingers in our ears as a memory inseparable from sunshine, blue linen coats, and Pauillac. But the workmen on the scaffolding remained always a difficulty; when we went out on to our private balcony to hang up our sponges, or to throw the tea-leaves into the gutter of an adjacent roof, it was embarrassing to have to lay bare these domestic arrangements to an audience seated, seemingly, in the sky, not fifteen feet away. But they were companionable people, and, if they had not had a habit of walking over chasms on single planks, with blocks of stone two feet square balanced on their heads, we should have got quite fond of them. When we had finished, with the help of a battalion of flies, our _petit déjeuner_ of excellent _café au lait_, admirable butter, and sour bread, we were conducted, at our own request, to the kitchen to interview Madame, having while at breakfast made up from Bellows’ Dictionary all the words under the headings of ‘vine’ and ‘grape’ with a view to the conversation. Madame was a solid lady, built much on the lines of a cottage loaf, full of years, of good and greasy living, and possessed of an almost excessive repose of manner. She sat immutably in the kitchen window, and kept a frugal eye on the cook and her handful of wood embers, while she directed her household and read the _feuilleton_ in her five-centimes Bordeaux paper. [Illustration: MADAME.]