May 17.--We rose at five in the morning, desirous to secure a cool walk to the Tour des Pilotes, a signal post on the high cape above Cette. The sun was however prepared for us, and continued to grill us alive from the first moment; and, after all, the prospect from this station, to which you climb as if ascending the steep roof of a house, is not of a nature to repay the exertion. We went to satisfy our consciences that there was nothing to see, and we saw nothing. The Pyrenees, so far from being visible near Montpelier, cannot be distinguished even from this nearer point, excepting, perhaps, on a peculiarly clear day; and no other feature worth mentioning occurs. The coast presents a bare and uninhabited appearance, arising partly from the almost total want of trees. Our perquisitions in the town of Cette itself were more fortunate, though, by-the-by, it exceeds Lyons itself in dirt and ill smells. It is a place of considerable trade in proportion to its size, and is employed chiefly as an entrepot for goods, which may be landed and reshipped without paying duty: and a walk on the quay affords, in consequence, considerable varieties of the human face divine, neat as imported. I recognised a group of Catalan sailors by their brown jackets embroidered with shreds of gaudy cloth, their red night-caps, and the redicillas in which their hair was bagged. No race of men with whom I am at all acquainted bear so marked a character of animation and decision in every movement of ordinary life as these sturdy provincials, or would be more remarked by a stranger among a mixed concourse of different nations. The same exuberance of animal motion which degenerates into restlessness and buffoonery in the Neapolitan, or the native of Languedoc, assumes a more dignified character in the Catalan, who is certainly a gentleman of Nature's own making. One of the crew, a tall athletic fellow, was holding forth to the rest on some trivial matter with a varied and graceful action, which might have served as a model to a painter. The rest were at breakfast; but even their mode of pouring the wine on their tongues at arm's length, from the long spout of a sort of glass kettle, had somewhat classical in it, and reminded me of the recumbent figure in the Herculanean painting, who is drinking in the same manner. Simple as it may appear, this knack is not to be acquired without a long apprenticeship, and I was ludicrously reminded of my abortive efforts to master it by the sight of the party on the quay. It certainly is adapted for making the most of any liquid, and might have been adopted during such a scarcity of water as the Hanoverian consul informed us existed in Cette during the former year. Not a drop of rain fell for ten months, and water at last became dearer than wine.