the horizon is bounded by low, dim hills, the sky becomes sombre and lowering. But there is something about all this desolation and silence and monotony that excites the imagination. Even our epicurean friends felt the strange charm, for this is the region where truffles abound, scented out by the delicate organ of the animal sacred to St. Anthony the Great! We were now in Quercy, which comprises such a variety of soil and temperature. In one part everything is verdant and flowery, the hills wreathed with vines and the trees covered with fruit-blossoms, and over all a radiant sun; perhaps a little beyond is a stunted vegetation, the trees of a northern clime, and a country as rough and bleak as Scotland, with long, desolate moors, arid and melancholy in the extreme. Some way this side of Roc Amadour we came upon the singular gap of Padirac, where St. Martin is said to have had a race with the devil. They were both mounted on mules, St. Martin’s a little the worse for wear, and, starting across the country, they flew over walls and precipices and steep cliffs, without anything being able to arrest their course. Satan at length turned to the saint and laid a wager he could open a gap in the earth no unaided mortal could pass. St. Martin laughed him to scorn. The angel of darkness then stretched forth his hand, and, laying on the ground his forefinger, which suddenly shot out to an enormous length, the earth instantaneously opened beneath it to the depth of a hundred and fifty feet. “Is that all?” cried the undaunted saint, as he spurred his beast. The mule sprang across the yawning gulf, one hundred feet broad, leaving the impress of his hoofs in the solid rock, as is to be clearly seen at this day. One of these foot-prints turns out, because, we are told, St. Martin’s mule was lame. This, of course, made his victory the more wonderful. After this feat the saint, in his turn, challenged the demon, and, resuming their race, St. Martin hastily thrust a cross of reeds into the fissure of a rock they came to, whereupon Satan’s mule reared and plunged and overthrew its rider, to the everlasting glory of St. Martin and the triumph of the cross. A more durable cross of stone now marks the spot where this great victory was won over the foul fiend.