The few days that we spent there with Monsieur and Madame A. were like no other part of our lives, and retained to the last the ease and enjoyment and the pervading sense of welcome that came so soothingly to us that first afternoon. English management and comforts were not made incongruous by the aromatic flavour of French surroundings and the vivid pageant of the vintage; each accented the other, and retired into the background with unfailing fitness. It was near the end of the vintage when we arrived. The handsome red and white buildings which held the _cuvier_, the long line of stables and farm-buildings, the immense storehouses full of wine and wine barrels, were at their busiest, and on the slopes below the _château_ the vintagers were working at top speed to finish by the end of the week. As we walked through the long vineyards by the river, the grapeless rows of vines looked forlorn and elderly, like mothers who have married off their daughters and have no occupation left. It was far more inspiriting to move farther on, and watch the sight that was now so familiar and yet always so fresh, the women’s figures moving waist-high in the green,--the men carrying the heavy _hottes_ of fruit on their necks, the overseer with his eight-foot pole pointing fatefully to the bunch of grapes left behind by the careless _vendangeuses_, the hurry and bustle of everything, and the creamy oxen stepping slowly and imperturbably through it all, with their seventeen hands of height shrouded in grey draperies to preserve them from the flies, sentient apparently of nothing except the driver’s voice and the guiding [Illustration: FIN DE VENDANGE.] touch of his stick. There is a stable full of great English cart-horses at Loudenne, such as had not been seen in France since the days of Agincourt, but these descendants of the mediæval warhorse are used only for the rougher farm-work; it is said that the oxen, from their clockwork slowness and placidity, do not break and injure the vines as a horse might, and though this is contradicted, and the days of oxen are said to be numbered in the Médoc, they still pace in couples from vineyard to _cuvier_, setting their hoofs down together with the grave accuracy of a minuet, neither slackening nor straining, whether the two tall tubs on the cart behind them are full or empty.