It was a very long room, so I saw as I followed, lighted principally by an open door at the far end of it, and over half the floor was strewn a thick litter of straw. The open door framed an oblong of glaring white road, and tendrils of vine with the sun shining through their leaves, and the light struck up on the boarded ceiling, and dealt mercifully with the details of a long table with black bottles on it that was disposed beyond the region of the straw. ‘It is here that the vintagers eat and sleep,’ said the _vigneron_, taking a loving sip from the tumbler for fear it should overflow. ‘_Mais voilà!_’--with ecstasy--‘mademoiselle is about to walk upon one of them! He has drunk too much of the _moût_!’ My cousin was plunging her way through the straw with uncertain strides and without her eyeglasses, so that it must have been a considerable shock to her when a crimson face with a white beard reared itself from the straw at her feet, and stared with a petrified terror at this episode in the dreams induced by _moût_. It was not only at her, however, that the old man thus gazed transfixed. The monkey had escaped, and was advancing, evidently much exhilarated by the straw, with demoniac leaps and cries, and doubtless the vintager was realising that he must have got ‘them’ very badly this time. Whatever he may have thought, the monkey settled the question for my cousin. She fled back to us, and when in safety took her gulp of _moût_ with a heroism that I well knew to be a refinement of spite. CHAPTER V. [Illustration] The sitting-room in our hotel at Pauillac was discovered and annexed by us on the afternoon of our first day in the Médoc. It was a large room and a pleasant, and, so far as we were aware, had never before been trodden by the foot of man; certainly none trod it once we had taken possession. The sandy bootmarks that we distributed about its polished red floor remained there during the whole of our stay at Pauillac undisturbed by a brush, and unmingled with the footprint of the _négociant en vins_. The two big plaited maize-straw arm-chairs stood at attention by the table just as they were left; and, most wonderful of all, we could open the windows and know they would not be shut the moment our backs were turned. Apparently the other people in the hotel had no time to spend in the sitting-room. The wine merchants went forth in loud companies every morning, but--like the Irish lady who was said to be ‘the most thronging woman ever you seen; sure, she’d go out o’ the house twenty times for the once she’d come in’--they never seemed to return, and, whatever may have happened to them, the _salon_ remained undisturbedly ours.