rocks, with the quiet Saone on one side, and the swiftly-running Rhone on the other. In our journey from Lyons to Marseilles we travelled by land instead of taking the steamboat, as is commonly done as far as Avignon. The common books of travels will tell you how numerous are the ruins of feudal times perched upon the heights all along the Rhone, remnants of fortresses and castles, overlooking a vast extent of country and once serving as places of refuge to the cultivators of the soil who dwelt in their vicinity—how frequently also are to be met with the earlier yet scarcely less fresh traces of Roman colonization and dominion, in gateways, triumphal arches, walls, and monuments—how on entering Provence you find yourself among a people of a different physiognomy from those of the northern provinces, speaking a language which rather resembles Italian than French—how the beauty of the women of Avignon still does credit to the taste of the clergy, who made that city for more than half a century the seat of the Papal power—and how, as you approach the shores of the Mediterranean, the mountains which rise from the fruitful valleys shoot up in wilder forms, until their summits become mere pinnacles of rock wholly bare of vegetation. Marseilles is seated in the midst of a semicircle of mountains of whitish rock, the steep and naked sides of which scarce afford "a footing for the goat." Stretching into the Mediterranean they inclose a commodious harbor, in front of which are two or three rocky islands anchored in a sea of more vivid blue than any water I had ever before seen. The country immediately surrounding the city is an arid and dusty valley, intersected here and there with the bed of a brook or torrent, dry during the summer. It is carefully cultivated, however, and planted with vineyards, and orchards of olive, fig, and pomegranate trees. The trees being small and low, the foliage of the olive thin and pale, the leaves of the fig broad and few, and the soil appearing everywhere at their roots, as well as between the rows of vines, the vegetation, when viewed from a little distance, has a meagre and ragged appearance. The whiteness of the hills, which the eye can hardly bear to rest upon at noon, the intense blue of the sea, the peculiar forms of the foliage, and the deficiency of shade and verdure, made me almost fancy myself in a tropical region.