It strikes the foreigner as strange that your baker here gives you a tally-stick, even to-day, when pass-books and all sorts of automatic calculators are everywhere to be found. It is a fact, however, that your baker does this at St. Rémy; and regulates the length of your credit by the length of the stick, a plan which has many advantages for all concerned over other methods. You arrange as to what your daily loaf shall be, and for every one delivered a notch is cut in the stick, which you guard as you would your purse; that is, you guard your half of it, for it has been split down the middle, and the worthy baker has a whole battery of these split sticks strung along the dashboard of his cart. The two separate halves are put together when the notch is cut across the joint, and there you have undisputable evidence of delivery. It’s very much simpler than the old backwoods system of keeping accounts on a slate, and wiping off the slate when they were paid, and it’s safer for all concerned. When you pay your baker at St. Rémy, he steps inside your kitchen and puts the two sticks on the fire, and together you see them go up in smoke. [Illustration: _Baker’s Tally-sticks_] [Illustration: _St. Rémy_] St. Rémy itself is a historic shrine, sitting jauntily beneath the jagged profile of the Alpines, from whose crest one gets one of those wonderful vistas of a rocky gorge which is, in a small way, only comparable to the cañon of the Colorado. It is indeed a splendid view that one gets just as he rises over the crest of this not very ample or very lofty mountain range, and it has all the elements of grandeur and brilliancy which are possessed by its more famous prototypes. It is quite indescribable, hence the illustration herewith must be left to tell its own story. Below, in the ample plain in which St. Rémy sits, is a wonderful garden of fruits and flowers. St. Rémy is a great centre for commerce in olives, olive-oil, vegetables, and fruit which is put up into tins and exported to the ends of the earth. Not every one likes olive-trees as a picturesque note in a landscape any more than every one likes olives to eat. But for all that the grayish-green tones of the flat-topped _oliviers_ of these parts are just the sort of things that artists love, and a plantation of them, viewed from a hill above, has as much variety of tone, and shade, and colour as a field of heather or a poppy-strewn prairie. The inhabitants of most of the old-time provinces of France have generally some special heirloom of which they are exceedingly fond; but not so fond but that they will part with it for a price. The Breton has his great closed-in bed, the Norman his _armoire_, and the Provençal his “grandfather’s clock,” or, at least, a great, tall, curiously wrought affair, which we outsiders have come to designate as such.