We were taken up a corner staircase to the upper floor, and were there received by the superhumanly well-bred and intelligent official who is invariably found in such places; we were also received and closely examined by the swarm of fat wasps that, in the _cuviers_, is fully as invariable, and rather more intelligent. No one seems to object to these wasps and their pertinacity; Monsieur Z. and the manager merely gave a pitying glance in the direction of my cousin, when, in the middle of a most creditable question about the phylloxera, her voice broke into a shriek, and after a few seconds of dervish-like insanity, she brought up from the back of her neck the fragments of a wasp, and hurled them to the floor with a dramatic force that was quite unstudied. The wasps congregated most thickly about an arched [Illustration: HER VOICE BROKE INTO A SHRIEK.] opening in the wall, through which a crane poked its long lean arm into the open air, and dangled its chain for the tubs full of grapes that were brought underneath it by the oxen. Up came each purple load, already battered and robbed of its bloom by the crushing and packing, with the bloated yellow wasps hanging on to it, and the long arm of the crane swung it round to the _pressoir_, which here was a broad truck on wheels. The method then became of the usual repulsive kind. The grapes were churned from their stalks in a machine, the juice ran in a turgid river round the _pressoir_, and, paddling in this, the bare-legged workmen shovelled the grapes into the _cuves_, whose open maws gaped through trap-doors in the floor. Other men packed the stalks into a machine like a pair of stays; when it was full, the tight-lacing began by means of a handle and cogged wheels, and when it was over, the stalks were taken out dry and attenuated, and flung from a window, with the cheerless prospect of being utilised at some future time as top-dressing for their yet unborn brethren.