The _contre-danse_ in which we were thus embroiled stormed on with conversational intervals between the figures for about twenty minutes. It was an inflamed variety of kitchen Lancers, danced with a rhythmic fury, and larded with impromptu flourishes on the part of the gentlemen. We envied the bolster as she bobbed serenely past us, riding the waves of the _contre-danse_ like a bottle in a chopping sea, while we were struggling in its depths and trying with slides and springs to overtake its impossible rhythm. A reel at a tenants’ dance in Galway, the ‘D’Alberts’ at a sergeants’ ball at the Curragh, the ‘barn-dance’ on a carpet after dinner on New Year’s night,--in all these violent amusements we have competed with a measure of success, but candour compels us to state that our _début_ in the _contre-danse_ at Château Loudenne was somewhat of a failure. Sorry spectacles as we were by the time its five or six figures were over, we should have been still more dilapidated had it not been for those intervals wherein we were talked to by our respective vinedressers as agreeably, as politely, and with as easy a selection of topics as if they were daily in the habit of discoursing to English ladies. In this connection we may say that not one of these peasants of the most wine-making district in the world owed any of their hilarity to the claret in which they lived, moved, and had their being; in fact, not once during our fortnight in the Médoc did we see any man who had taken more than was good for him.