Once out of Perpignan, the Pyrenees lay clear before us. Over bare red hills, near at hand, rose a gray mountain rampart, neither lofty nor formidable; but westward, between the valleys of the Tech and the Tet, towered the solitary pyramid of the Canigou, streaked with snow-filled ravines. The landscapes would have appeared bleak and melancholy, but for the riotous growth of vines which cover the plain and climb the hillsides wherever there is room for a terrace of earth. These vines produce the dark, rich wine of Roussillon, the best vintage of Southern France. Hedges of aloes, clumps of Southern cypress, poplars by the dry beds of winter streams, with brown tints in the houses and red in the soil, increased the resemblance to Spain. Rough fellows, in rusty velvet, who now and then dug their dangling heels into the sides of the mules or asses they rode, were enough like _arrieros_ or _contrabandistas_ to be the real article. Our stout and friendly coachman, even, was hailed by the name of Moreno, and spoke French with a foreign accent. At the post-station of Le Boulou, we left the plain of Roussillon behind us. At this end of the Pyrenean chain there are no such trumpet-names as Roncesvalles, Fontarabia, and the Bidassoa. Hannibal, Cæsar, Charlemagne, and the Saracens have marched through these defiles, and left no grand historic footprint, but they will always keep the interest which belongs to those natural barriers and division walls whereby races and histories were once separated. It was enough for me that here were the Pyrenees, and I looked forward, perhaps, with a keener curiosity, to the character and forms of their scenery, than to the sentiment which any historic association could produce. A broad and perfect highway led us through shallow valleys, whose rocky sides were hung with rows of olive-trees, into wilder and more abrupt dells, where vegetation engaged in a struggle with stone, and without man's help would have been driven from the field. Over us the mountains lifted themselves in bold bastions and parapets, disforested now, if those gray upper plateaus ever bore forests, and of a uniform slaty-gray in tone, except where reddish patches of oxidation showed like the rust of age.