In a very short time we found ourselves being whirled off in a carriage to Quinault, the country-house aforesaid, and were being told all manner of strange things. We had not looked at a newspaper since we left Paris, and it was hard to believe that the most notable figure in Irish politics should have left them for ever, and no echo of such a thing come to us, even in the quiet, far-away vineyards of the Médoc. We were now in the St. Emilion district, and without wishing to insult the Médoc, it must be said that it cannot compare in beauty with the opposite side of the Gironde. There was an air of generous luxuriance about the vines themselves that began to realise for us the vineyards of our more poetical visions. The stunted little shrubs on which we had been forming our eye were no more to be seen. Tall bushes, trained to spread like fans on espaliers, had taken their place, and pictorially, at any rate, there can be no comparison between the two systems. There was a sunset that evening that made the first sight of the St. Emilion vines a thing greatly to be remembered. Quinault is a scientific vineyard, and the charm of colour conferred by the blue-green sulphate of copper that stains all the leaves, is a fine confirmation of the theory that the useful is necessarily the beautiful. These blue-green leaves had turned to a mysterious metallic grey in the evening light; up the middle aisle came a cart drawn by a big white horse, a scarlet-capped man was standing up in it between the barrels of grapes, his figure showing ‘dark against day’s golden death;’ after it followed a procession of vintagers, women and boys mostly, the yellow light behind them giving to the long row of figures the effect of being a company of saints on an early Italian background; and, last of all, came a little, incredibly bowed woman, who had been vintaging here at Quinault for the last eighty years--La Mère Mémé, the oldest and the most conscientious _vendangeuse_ of the district. ‘She is always the first at the end of the row,’ we were told, ‘and she never leaves a bunch behind her, and she has eighty-seven years; _n’est-ce pas, ma Mère_?’ [Illustration: LA MÈRE MÉMÉ--ALWAYS FIRST AT THE END OF HER ROW.] Mère Mémé admitted the eighty-seven years with an almost bored acquiescence. She had been very old for so long that she was less proud of it than she had [Illustration: A SKETCH WAS MADE OF HER AS SPEEDILY AS MIGHT BE.]