These beasts alone knew the way down; once parted from them, they were lost, for the Italian boys who had furnished them had long since fled from the Judge’s wrath. The Judge and the Doctor forbade my paying the hotel bill, and I had to do it surreptitiously. My doctor (who was a victim to rheumatism) called my attention to the fact that on the summit of every Alpine pass we crossed, after all other vegetation ceased, the aconite plant grew, showing nature had provided there a remedy for the disease which the severity of the climate developed in man. My Irish friend, living far from the sea, had a passion for all fish but pike, which he detested, and which was daily served to us wherever we went; finally, reaching Berlin, he insisted on having sea fish. It was promised us, but, lo and behold! when dinner was served, in came the pike, with the apology that no other fish could then be had in the city. After dinner we went to the opera, and there, in the ballet (superbly done as it was), were at least one hundred pike dancing on the stage, which so upset my friend that he seized his hat in a rage and left the house. WINTER IN PAU. CHAPTER VI. _Winter in Pau--I Hire a Perfect Villa for $800 a year--Luxury at Small Cost--I Learn How to Give Dinners--Fraternizing with the Bordeaux Wine Merchants--The Judge’s Wild Scheme--I Get Him up a Dinner--General Bosquet--The Pau Hunt--The Frenchmen Wear Beautiful Pink Coats but their Horses Wont Jump--Only the General Took the Ditch._ After you have been a little while in Europe you are seized with a desire to have a house of your own, to enjoy home comforts. Your loss of individuality comes over you. In Paris you feel particularly lost, and as this feeling increased on me I resolved to go to Pau, take a house, and winter there. The Duchess of Hamilton had abandoned the idea of passing the winter in Pau, so that many lovely residences were seeking tenants. For eight hundred dollars a year I hired a beautiful villa, looking on the Pyrénées, directly opposite the _Pic du Midi d’Ossau_, with lovely grounds filled with camelia bushes, and I then felt that I had all a man could desire,--a perfect home made to one’s hand, a climate where the wind never blows hard enough, even in winter, to stir a leaf on the trees, the best cooks in the world, and where people appeared to live but to eat well and sleep. A country of beautiful women; the peasantry a mixture of Spanish and French blood; the climate so soft and genial as to take away all harshness or roughness from their faces--rich Titian-like women, with fine coloring and superb figures--what more could man desire? I was, I may say, a pioneer American there.