There is a staircase that circles dizzily down the Tower, a Jacob’s ladder that would make an angel giddy, and rather than enter again the lift that was even now sliding down to us on its steel cable through the iron network, my cousin said she would walk down. It was the final dispute of the expedition, and, after affording much amusement to the bystanders, it ended in my leading my cousin, with her eyes tightly shut, and the expression of Lady Jane Grey on her way to execution, into the box with the sloping floor, in whose safety it was so impossible to believe. We sit safely now in the ground floor of a two-storeyed house, and as we look back to that experience, it seems to us that no dentist’s chair can have cradled more suffering than the lift of the Eiffel Tower. We left Paris by a late train that night. Summer and its habiliments had alike been crushed out of sight by dint of a final war-dance upon our portmanteaus. Everything connected with the Médoc was put away; the Kodak, with its hidden store of vintage pictures, the apparatus of afternoon tea, even the well-thumbed and invaluable copy of Bellows’ Dictionary that had up to this abided immutably in our pockets, was laid sorrowing to rest in the crown of the Libourne straw hat. What use was it to us on a degraded line of railway on which all the porters spoke English? [Illustration: SUCCESS TO THE VINTAGE OF 1891.] We took a last look out of the train window at the electric star of the Eiffel Tower, perched among the elder stars in the sky behind us, and my cousin opened her bonnet-box and drew forth for the last time that widow’s cruse, the bottle of Grand St. Lambert. There was about a wine-glassful left, and out of a thick green Pauillac mug we solemnly drank success to our first vintage. [Illustration: FINIS] MORRISON AND GIBB, PRINTERS, EDINBURGH. End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of In the vine country, by Edith Somerville and Martin Ross