All the country was ‘_en plein vendange_,’ she told us; wherever we went we could see the vintagers, and if we wished to make a ‘_jolie petite course à pied_’ we could not do better than walk to the little village of St. Lambert. _En effet_, she herself was _propriétaire_, and it would give her son great pleasure to show us his _cuvier_ and all else that we might care to see. ‘And peasants?’ we said vaguely; ‘we want to talk to the peasants.’ Madame looked slightly bewildered. ‘_Il y en avait bien assez de ces gens-là!_’ she said, with a contempt that we afterwards understood, when we heard she had been a peasant herself. ‘I have a peasant of my own; _ces dames_ can go and talk to her as much as they wish.’ The broad esplanade was full of sun, and dogs, and sailors, as we debouched upon it with our note-books, sketch-books, and the Kodak, at some nine o’clock of the morning. A steamer was hooting at the wooden pier over which we had crawled in gloomy fatigue the night before; a boat with a big lug-sail was performing wonderful and strange manœuvres of going about with the help of the current; and a full-rigged ship, with a dazzling green hull, was being towed up to Bordeaux by a black and misshapen tug-boat called _Ercule_, the family name of all Bordeaux tug-boats. It seemed to be a market or _fête_ day of a minor sort in Pauillac; something connected with a saint, probably, which in Ireland would have meant that every one would have gone to Mass and done no work for the rest of the day; but here every one worked, just as they did on Sunday, and the people who had no work to do went about and enjoyed themselves. We remember once asking a man at home why the people were going to Mass and what holy day it was. He said he didn’t rightly know, but he thought the ‘Blessed Vargin’ was implicated. We did not find out who or what it was that was implicated in the Pauillac _fête_, but we take this opportunity of thanking them for celebrating themselves on our first day in the Médoc. All manner of unexpected things and people went by on their way to the town that straggled on the hill behind the Boulevard de la [Illustration: A MÉDOC DOG-CART.] Marine. Donkey-carts, waggons, and _charettes_, driven by brown-faced, white-capped women, or boys in flat felt caps of scarlet or blue,--the _berets_ that are found up the west of France from Biarritz to Brittany,--a man on stilts, stalking by with the grave composure of a heron; and, creeping through the midst of all these, came now and again a long cart drawn by fawn-coloured oxen, who paced with that swinging saunter that became afterwards so familiar to us, their faces and sleek bodies covered absurdly with a thick netted material to keep the flies off, and their neatly-shod hoofs keeping time like clockwork.