THE BIRTH-PLACE OF S. VINCENT DE PAUL “I love all waste And solitary places where we taste The pleasure of believing what we see Is boundless as we wish our souls to be: And such was this wide ocean and the shore More barren than its billows.” --_Shelley._ The Landes--that long, desolate tract on the western coast of France between the Gironde and the Adour, with its vast forests of melancholy pines, its lone moors and solitary deserts, its broad marshes, and its dunes of sand that creep relentlessly on as if they had life--appeal wonderfully to the imagination, that _folle du logis_, as Montaigne calls it, but which, in spite of him, we love to feed. One may travel for hours through these vast steppes covered with heather without discovering the smoke of a single chimney, or anything to relieve the monotonous horizon, unless a long line of low sand-hills that look like billows swayed to and fro in the wind; or some low tree standing out against the cloudless heavens, perhaps half buried in the treacherous sands; or a gaunt peasant, the very silhouette of a man, on his stilts, “five feet above contradiction,” like Voltaire’s preacher, perhaps with his knitting-work in his hands, or a distaff under his arm, as if fresh from the feet of Omphale, driving his flock before him--all birds of one feather, or sheep of one wool; for he is clad in a shaggy sheepskin coat, and looks as if he needed shearing as much as any of them. Or perhaps this Knight of the Sable Fleece--for the sheep of the Landes are mostly black--is on one of the small, light horses peculiar to the region, said to have an infusion of Arabian blood--thanks to the Saracen invaders--which are well adapted to picking their way over quaking bogs and moving sands, but unfortunately are fast degenerating from lack of care in maintaining the purity of the breed.