More and more dances followed, till our legs ached, and the cement floor wore holes in our shoes, and then, as we were preparing to go back to the house, it was said that _ces dames_ ought absolutely to see the ‘Bignou.’ The ‘Bignou’ sounded like the name of some monster of the middle ages, and might have been the local name for a werewolf for all we knew; but we stayed, nevertheless, and presently saw entering by another door nothing more alarming than four little old women. It was explained to us that the ‘Bignou’ was an ancient dance, almost obsolete in that part of the country, and that these four were the only worthy exponents of it, and had been actually awakened out of their first sleep to dance it for us. A rough-looking boy was hoisted on to a barrel at the end of the room--a boy who had come all the way from Brittany for the vintage (if, as is highly probable, I did not misunderstand my partner), bringing with him the little wooden instrument upon which he now set up a shrill piping that sounded like a penny whistle with a bluebottle in it. This archaic flute was itself the ‘Bignou’ from which the dance took its name, and the extraordinary tune which it buzzed forth might have been composed by Tubal Cain. The four old _danseuses_, in their white caps and full black skirts, took their positions in the middle of the room with a prim consciousness of their own importance, and all that we had yet seen was child’s play compared with the intricate measure [Illustration: THE LITTLE FIGURES FLEW IN DARTING CIRCLES, LIKE FLIES IN A POOL.] that followed. The little figures flew in darting circles, like flies on a pool, to the mad squeals of the ‘Bignou,’ their list-shod feet slapping the floor in absolute accord, and their full skirts and white cap-strings leaping out behind them in time to each angular twist of the tune. As we watched them we no longer wondered at their age. Steps such as those could not be learned in less than seventy years. The onlookers stamped and clapped, the ‘Bignou’ player blew with a possessed frenzy, and the little old women circled tirelessly, like witches on the Brocken. I do not know how long the dance lasted, but as we went back in the darkness to the _château_ we felt as if the music had gone to our heads; and when I lay down under my mosquito curtains, the dark figures whirled and swung giddily before me, as if the spirit of the Médoc had been expressed in them as intoxicatingly as in its wine. CHAPTER XII. [Illustration]