Not all of these great timepieces which are found in the peasant homes round about St. Rémy are ancient; indeed, few of them are, but all have a certain impressiveness about them which a household god ought to have, whether it is a real antique or a gaudily painted thing with much brasswork and, above all, a gong that strikes at painfully frequent intervals with a vociferousness which would wake the Seven Sleepers if they hadn’t been asleep so long. The traffic in these tall, coffin-like clocks--though they are not by any means sombre in hue--is considerable at St. Rémy. The local clock-maker (he doesn’t really make them) buys the cases ready-made from St. Claude, or some other wood-carving town in the Jura or Switzerland, and the works in Germany, and assembles them in his shop, and stencils his name in bold letters on the face of the thing as maker. This is deception, if you like, but there is no great wrong in it, and, since the clock and watch trade the world over does the same thing, it is one of the immoralities which custom has made moral. They are not dear, these great clocks of Provence, which more than one tourist has carried away with him before now as a genuine “antique.” Forty or fifty francs will buy one, the price depending on the amount of chasing on the brasswork of its great pendulum. Six feet tall they stand, in rows, all painted as gaudily as a circus wagon, waiting for some peasant to come along and make his selection. When it does arrive at some humble cottage in the Alpines, or in the marshy vineyard plain beside the Rhône, there is a sort of house-warming and much feasting, which costs the peasant another fifty francs as a christening fee. The clocks of St. Rémy and the _panetières_ which hang on the wall and hold the household supply of bread open to the drying influences of the air, and yet away from rats and mice, are the chief and most distinctive house-furnishings of the homes of the countryside. For the rest the Provençal peasant is as likely to buy himself a wickerwork chair, or a German or American sewing-machine, with which to decorate his home, as anything else. One thing he will not have foreign to his environment, and that is his cooking utensils. His “_batterie de cuisine_” may not be as ample as that of the great hotels, but every one knows that the casseroles of commerce, whether one sees them in San Francisco, Buenos Ayres, or Soho, are a Provençal production, and that there is a certain little town, not many hundred miles from St. Rémy, which is devoted almost exclusively to the making of this all-useful cooking utensil. [Illustration: _A Panetière_] The _panetières_, like the clocks, have a great fascination for the tourist, and the desire to possess one has been known to have been so great as to warrant an offer of two hundred and fifty francs for an article which the present proprietor probably bought for twenty not many months before.