When we got into the carriage again we were crammed with information, and a silence as of indigestion settled upon us as we whirled along the hog-backed vineyard road to Château Lafite. It is not only in wine that Mouton Rothschild is beaten by its nearest neighbour. In the matter of a _château_, Lafite scores still more decidedly; of that no one could have any doubt who saw this old country-house, with its pointed towers, its terraced gardens with their ambushed perfumes that took the hot wind by surprise, its view over the soft country to other _châteaux_, and its delightful wood, where grassy walks wound away into the shadows. After these things, going to see the _cuviers_ and the wine-making was like beginning again on roast beef after dessert; but the appetite came in eating. It was Mouton Rothschild over again, only more so; it could not be more dazzlingly smart than its kinsman, but it was larger; more outhouses and more imposing, a greater number of _cuves_, a more ambitious manner of regulating the temperature. We were truly and genuinely interested, but none the less were we penetrated by a sense of the gross absurdity of our pose as students of viticulture, while Monsieur Z. and the manager of Château Lafite imparted fact upon fact antiphonally and seriously, without a shadow of distrust of our capabilities. Indeed, in all our vintage experiences we met with this heartfelt devotion to the subject, and this touching belief in our intelligence, and it was both a glory and a humiliation to us. Enfiladed thus by a cross-fire of what might be called grape-shot, we progressed in fullest importance round the quiet nurseries of the claret for which such an incredible future of dessert-tables is in store, and entered at last the doorway of a long low building. A few steps led downwards to another doorway, where a grave and courteous attendant presented us each with a candle placed in a socket at the end of a long handle, and unlocked a door into profound and pitchy blackness. It was like going to see the mummies at Bordeaux, it was even more like going into the cellar at home to look for rats, and my cousin’s skirts were instinctively gathered up and her candle lowered to the ground as the darkness closed its mouth upon us. It was cool and damp, it smelt of must and wine-barrels, and in some way one could feel that it was immense. Our guides turned to the right without hesitation, into a gallery whose walls, from the sandy floor to the vaulted ceiling, were made of bottles of wine. We walked on, and still on, trying to take it in, while on either side the tiers of bottles looked at us out of their partitions with cold uncountable eyes, eyebrowed sometimes, or bearded, with a fungus as snowy and delicate as _crêpe lisse_, on which the specks of dew glittered as the candle-light procession passed by.