At the actual mouth of the Rhône is Port St. Louis, from which the economists expect great things in the development of mid-France, particularly of those cities which lie in the Rhône valley. The idea is not quite so chimerical as that advanced in regard to the possibility of moving all the great traffic of Marseilles to the Étang de Berre; but it will be some years before Port St. Louis is another Lorient or Le Havre. In spite of this, Port St. Louis has grown from a population of eight hundred to that of a couple of thousands in a generation, which is an astonishing growth for a small town in France. The aspect of the place is not inspiring. A signal-tower, a lighthouse, a Hôtel de Ville,--which looks as though it might be the court-house of some backwoods community in Missouri,--and the rather ordinary houses which shelter St. Louis’s two thousand souls, are about all the tangible features of the place which impress themselves upon one at first glance. Besides this there is a very excellent little hotel, a veritable _hôtel du pays_, where you will get the fish of the Mediterranean as fresh as the hour they were caught; and the _mouton de la Camargue_, which is the most excellent mutton in all the world (when cooked by a Provençal _maître_); potatoes, of course, which most likely came in a trading Catalan bark from Algeria; and tomatoes and dates from the same place; to say nothing of melons--home-grown. It’s all very simple, but the marvel is that such a town in embryo as Port St. Louis really is can do it so well, and for this reason alone the visitor will, in most cases, think the journey from Arles worth making, particularly if he does it _en auto_, for the fifty odd kilometres are like a sanded, hardwood floor or a cinder path, and the landscape, though flat, is by no means deadly dull. Furthermore there is no one to say him nay if the driver chooses to make the journey _en pleine vitesse_. Bordering upon the Camargue, just the other side of the Rhône, is another similar tract: the Crau, a great, pebbly plain, supposed to have come into being many centuries before the beginning of our era. The hypotheses as to its formation are numerous, the chief being that it was the work of that mythological Hercules who cut the Strait of Gibraltar between the Mounts Calpe and Abyle (this, be it noted, is the French version of the legend). Not content with this wonder, he turned the Durance from its bed, as it flowed down from the Alps of Savoie, and a shower of stones fell from the sky and covered the land for miles around, turning it into a barren waste. For some centuries the tract preserved the name of “Champs Herculéen.” The reclaiming of the tract will be a task of a magnitude not far below that which brought it into being.